


Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi, et quorum pars magna fui

by ellieellieoxenfree



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 10:56:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13363197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellieellieoxenfree/pseuds/ellieellieoxenfree
Summary: It's hard to come home when you're all still running away from what's there.





	Quaeque ipsa miserrima vidi, et quorum pars magna fui

**Author's Note:**

> While the show never states whether Hartley is a meta, the novel The Haunting of Barry Allen explicitly references him as such, and I've taken that as my canon.
> 
> The title is from Virgil's Aeneid: 'So many terrible things I saw, and in so many of them I played a great part.'

The house on Earth-2 is unlike any Hartley has known: lived in and comfortable, more than a little messy. He isn’t sure if he likes being there. Harry leaves in the mornings, distractingly leggy and beautiful in a line of crisp suits, and presses some bills into Hartley’s hand. He chuckles apologetically at the implications and kisses Hartley and tells him they’ll get paperwork sorted as soon as possible and create him an identity wholesale. He offers, at one point, to let Hartley shed the skin of his old name and Hartley shakes his head no; he’s always hated being a Rathaway, but here it’s all he’s got left. 

If he’d had one, he could set his watch by their routines. Harry takes the paper and one slice of barely-buttered toast and and leaves in a gleaming boat of a car he’s named Rosalind Crick and calls Rosie. A few minutes later, Jesse thunders down the steps, weighed down with textbooks and papers, and flies out the door without saying goodbye. Hartley weighs the money in his hand and his options. He could leave, but he only sometimes does. He looks up museums and scientific lectures and finds a teetering bookshop that looks ready to collapse under its own dust, where he buys ancient copies of Heinrich Petraeus and Emil Cohn in the original German for a dollar and a half. Some days he putters entirely at home, rearranging Harry’s tea collection into alphabetical order or adjusting piles of dog-eared scientific journals into something resembling order. Harry has told him not to worry about the money — it’s there for whatever he needs — but Hartley has long since learned that money is no sure thing, and he squirrels away the majority of what Harry gives him.

He’s used to being alone in the house most evenings. Jesse goes out with friends, studying, partying, making up for lost time. Harry texts him with apologies that a meeting will run late and don’t wait to eat on his account, he’s not sure when he’ll be home. Hartley makes himself sandwiches and reads his German texts, moving towards the now-tidy pile of scientific journals once he’s finished with them, and then eventually to Harry’s collection of tattered spy thriller paperbacks about hard-jawed men fighting a war he’s never heard of. He runs out of books before he runs out of empty days to fill, and so he starts taking the train around Central City, one end of a line to the other, publicly anonymous.

There are rare times they’re all home for dinner. Harry cooks, Jesse at his side, handing him spoons and slicing peppers and scrounging in the cabinet for paprika. Hartley feels like an interloper. They’d always had an army of chefs to run the kitchen when he was growing up, and the very act of cooking had struck him as an alien task someone else always did. He’s smart enough to have taught himself some of the basics now — scrambled eggs, pastas, a passable chili — but he’s not prepared for the chatty domesticity of Harry and Jesse’s dinner preparations. He steps in to help, as best he can, when Jesse has to run to the store for olive oil and Harry needs someone to bring him the oregano when he can’t leave the stove. Hartley realizes, too late, that Harry has just added a healthy dose of basil instead, and the recipe is ruined. He mumbles an apology, expecting Harry to shout at him for his stupidity, but no such scolding comes. 

Hartley feels defanged and off-kilter here, too unsure of his surroundings to protect himself with his usual sarcastic defenses. The basil is a minor mistake, but what will happen when he ruins something on a wide scale? There will always be some fatal flaw to him that will be unearthed and he’ll be dealt with accordingly. Bad things, of course, happen in threes.

He sleeps nestled in the crook of Harry’s arm, or at least dozes long enough that Harry’s breathing finally settles, deep and easy, and his limbs go doughy. Hartley carefully slides out of bed and goes down to the kitchen, pouring himself mug after mug of tea, working his way through his alphabetized collection. The silence of the house is easier in the middle of the night, almost normal. There’s a plate of ginger snaps that Harry’s assistant had made sitting on the counter, and he takes one and chews it as quietly as possible, trying not to disturb the hush.

There’s a quiet yelp behind him, and Hartley whirls around, almost dropping his mug in the process. Jesse is in the kitchen doorway, out of breath, soaked in sweat, staring at him. ‘You scared me,’ she says. ‘I didn’t realize you were awake.’

Hartley sets the tea down with an unsteady hand. ‘Upset stomach,’ he says, which is both a lie and not. Just past Jesse, he can see the clock, stubbornly displaying the impossible time of 2:43. He swallows. ‘Were you running?'

Jesse tugs at the edge of her t-shirt and gives him a pleading look. ‘Don’t tell Dad. He’ll go nuts if he knew I was out alone.’

‘Not really my business,’ Hartley says with a shrug. ‘He’s asleep anyway.’

‘I’m surprised you can’t hear him snoring from here,’ says Jesse, pouring herself a glass of water. ‘Did you take any proxadine?’

Hartley gives her a blank stare.

‘Not something you have on your Earth?’

‘There are a lot of things we don’t have on my Earth,’ Hartley says. He traces his finger over the rim of his mug, feeling freshly adrift and foolish.

‘It’s for upset stomachs,’ Jesse says. ‘I can get you some. It’s in the bathroom cabinet.’

Hartley dodges the offer and asks, instead, why Jesse has been out running until almost three am.

‘Couldn’t sleep.’ Her half-truth lingers in the air. Hartley’s heard, faintly but with increasing frequency, the patter of her feet on the hallway carpet and the creak of the steps and, almost imperceptibly, the click of the front door lock. It’s quiet enough that had he ever been asleep, he’d never have heard her leave, but lying awake in the dark has attuned him to the house’s every breath and sigh. 

He knows the broad brushstrokes of the story: her preternatural genius, Zoom, long months of captivity, an uprooting from Earth-2 to Earth-1, her fractiousness against Harry’s overprotectiveness. Neither Harry nor Jesse has ever volunteered any more information, and Hartley has never asked. He’s unsettled by her attempts at pax, used to, instead, their wary circling of each other. She is the shining, optimistic future he wishes he could have had; he is the ugly, broken interloper who had stormed unasked into her father’s life. He wonders if she resents him, and tries his best to shove away the thought. ‘Do you run often?’ he finds himself asking. 

Jesse takes a sip of her water. ‘If I need to.’

They maneuver, each giving the tiniest bit of ground, throwing crumbs of information at each other, neither willing to fully crack open yet. There’s a jagged edge to Jesse’s voice that Hartley’s never heard and that he doesn’t even think she’s aware of. He hears her set the glass down a little too roughly, the water sloshing. Every noise and every gesture seems to have taken on extra weight.

‘Do you miss your earth?’

Hartley doesn’t expect the question, but he knows the answer immediately. ‘No.’ There hadn’t been anything there for him long before Harry Wells had tumbled through the breach. Team Flash had invited him on board, but he’d never truly been able to integrate into their close-knit group. There was no one else — no friends, no family — to miss him. He had left nothing behind. ‘Did you miss it here?’

‘I miss how it was,’ Jesse says. ‘It’s all different now. Half of my friends forgot about me and the others think I’m a freakshow. Every party I go to doesn’t feel right. Everybody in class keeps giving me sympathetic looks. I’m running out of people who seem like they want to be around me.’ She stops, suddenly self-conscious, and presses her lips together.

‘I’m sorry,’ Hartley says, in the absence of anything else. He wants to say that he understands the fury and frustration and alienation of the world passing by without consideration, but he tamps down the urge.

‘Yeah,’ says Jesse. ‘Everybody is.’ She’s clammed back up, hostile and guarded, but she doesn’t leave.

Hartley studies his tea, wraps his hands around the mug. It’s long gone cold, the surface filmy. ‘Would you rather I went back to my earth?’ he says. He doesn’t say ‘home.’

‘No offense, but you’re just a very small piece of this,’ Jesse says. ‘I’m not going to pretend I’m okay with you and Dad, but there are way more important things.’

‘Such as?’

Jesse hesitates for a moment before answering. ‘School. Friends. A million journalists all wanting the exclusive scoop on Central City’s most infamous kidnapping.’

Hartley recalls having been stunned when he first arrived on Earth-2 at the proliferation of tabloids: the staid ( _Daily Journal_ , _Central City Ledger_ ), the chatty and gossipy ( _Central Express_ , _Central City Chronicle_ , _Gab!_ ), the vile (the _Planeteer_ , a paper so egregiously full of lies that, Harry had said, he’d taken them to court more than once). He’d flipped through them a few times — seen pictures of Harry at galas, spotted familiar faces that belonged to entirely different people on this earth — but had never delved too deeply into them. The journalists he recalled from his youth had been quick to turn on him as soon as his parents had. They’d courted the Rathaways for tidbits of information and devoured the one that had been thrown away. He imagines, from Jesse’s disgusted tone, that Earth-2 isn’t so dissimilar in that regard.

’Everybody’s the same,’ Jesse says, flopping down into a chair and folding her arms over her chest. ‘They all want to pretend they feel bad about it, but they really want to know what it was like. I just wanted to come back and live my life and it’s like I have a big sign on my forehead that says ‘Ask me about the time a crazy metahuman kidnapped me because I definitely want to think about that every day.’ Sometimes I feel like that’s how everybody’s going to think of me forever.’

‘ _Perfer et obdura. Dolor hic tibi proderit olim_ ,’ Hartley says softly. Be patient and tough. Some day this pain will be useful to you.

‘Highly doubt that,’ says Jesse. She flashes him the smallest smile. ‘If you’re going to stump me with languages, you need to be way more obscure than that. I aced out of Latin before I finished high school.’

‘Next time,’ Hartley says with a smile of his own, grateful for this sudden moment of camaraderie. He knows it won’t last, and it doesn’t. Jesse looks away, fiddles with the edge of a placemat. She’s still all tightly coiled energy, hovering on the edge of breaking. There’s no amount of running that’s going to unwind her, Hartley knows, but doesn’t say. Instead, he brings the ginger snaps to the table and takes one for himself. He can feel Jesse’s eyes on him as he chews, but he says nothing.

Jesse picks up a ginger snap and begins demolishing it into a series of tinier and tinier crumbs. She’s quiet for so long it’s almost unbearable; Hartley nibbles a second, then a third cookie, trying to make the distraction last.

‘When I was little and I’d get sick, Dad would make the biggest fuss,’ Jesse says. ‘He’d tuck me into bed and he’d read me stories until I’d fall asleep and he’d stay with me the whole time, except when he’d leave to go to Nikita’s — it’s a little Russian restaurant, not too far away — and buy pelmeni soup from Olga, and then when I felt better he’d fix up all the pillows and bring out the tray so I could eat it in bed.’ She scrapes the ginger snap crumbs into a pile and pushes it around, pressing her thumbdown to create a neat indent before reshaping a mountain peak. ‘Sometimes I wish…’ She stops herself, starts again. ‘Look, I should probably get to bed.’

Hartley glances at the clock. In a few hours, the alarms will go off — Harry’s first, with one short slap to the snooze button, Jesse’s trailing behind. He knows he won’t sleep between now and then, so he tells Jesse he’ll take care of cleaning up.

‘Thanks,’ Jesse says. ‘And, um, seriously, _please_ don’t tell Dad.’

‘Of course,’ Hartley promises, rolling the placemat to trap the crumb pile Jesse had left. He lingers in the kitchen long after she disappears upstairs, rinsing his mug with agonizing slowness and smoothing out the aluminum foil before re-wrapping the plate of cookies. He’s careful not to make a sound when he comes back to the bedroom, but Harry, sprawled out over far more than half of the bed, doesn’t even stir as Hartley slides back under the covers. He curls into a small, tight ball on the edge of the bed and listens to Harry’s breathing and the occasional rustle of leaves outside. Soon enough, Harry will reach for him in his sleep, and Hartley will uncoil and mold himself against Harry’s body. For now, he presses his knuckles against his ribs, feeling strangely both empty and full. 

—

If he’d noticed anything the night before, Harry says nothing about it. He gets out of bed in his typical bleary, grouchy manner and into the shower with just a brief mumble that might be a ‘good morning’ and that Hartley accepts as such. The only conversation he makes while he’s getting dressed is that Ernie Greenbaum’s retirement party is tonight, so he has no idea when he’ll be home. ‘At least, if the past parties are any indication,’ he says with the resignation of a man who’s bundled a drunken Ernie Greenbaum into plenty of taxis over the years.

Hartley’s relieved he’s not obligated to attend another corporate function — God knows he’d been to enough in his youth — but it still stings a little. He bites back a question about the paperwork, not wanting to sound ungrateful, but he can’t keep himself from asking, ‘Will you be home any night this week?’

Harry slides on his watch and taps at a setting. Hartley hates that watch, hates the reminder that one of the first things Harry had done when they’d arrived back on Earth-2 was include a programming glitch into a system update so that he wouldn’t be detected as a meta. They’d had the beginnings of a fight over the watch (Hartley pointing out how uncomfortable it made him; Harry firing back that after Zoom, he’d be damned if he’d go anywhere without it), but neither had wanted to commit to a full-blown argument, and they’ve never discussed it since.

‘I don’t know yet,’ Harry says. ‘I was on your earth for a long time. There’s still a lot to catch up on. I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah,’ Hartley says. ‘Yeah, I get it.’ He throws the covers off and heads for the bathroom, choking down a lump of bitterness. At least he can catch up on his sleep tonight.

— 

Hartley finds the address for Nikita’s easily enough, but has less luck finding the cafe itself. It turns out to be tucked away on a side street splintered away from its brethren, unobtrusive and almost invisible. He walks past it a few times before he realizes that he can just barely make out a faded ‘kita’ on the awning over the door. It’s not much inside — a few tables with spotless white tablecloths, a register several decades past its prime, a teenage girl drying glasses — but the air is thick with the smells of cooking food, and his mouth waters a little.

‘You can sit anywhere,’ says the girl at the counter.

‘Actually, I, ah — ‘ Hartley fumbles for the word. ‘Do you sell containers of pelmeni soup?’

‘Oh, yeah, sure. We just have the one size,’ the girl says, indicating dimensions with her hands, ‘but there’s a fresh batch made, so we’ve got plenty. One container? Two?’

Hartley briefly considers buying enough soup for Harry, but decides against it. ‘One is fine.’

The girl gives a bouncing nod and whisks away to the kitchen. Hartley hears a chatty exchange in Russian, a language he speaks not a word of. Being on the other side of the equation is an unfamiliar feeling. He doesn’t like it.

He overpays for the soup and tells the girl to keep the change; he can’t abide the sound of coins jingling in his pocket, and he’s been so careful with his money that he figures he’s able to waste a few dollars just this once. It’s the sort of thing that his father would be outraged to see him do, which pleases Hartley.

The soup he leaves still in its paper bag in the refrigerator, and he scribbles a note for Jesse — _Dinner’s in the refrigerator if you want it. It’s not the way your dad would serve it, but I hope it helps anyway. —_ that he places on the foyer table.

Hartley ends up at the arthouse theatre, watching some turgid Portuguese romance that offers more thrills from its audience than its actual content. There’s an amorous young man who makes more than a little progress on his date before the third-act tuberculosis plot kicks in, and Hartley watches the man’s hand slowly descend back down, and the woman sitting next to him flushes and pats down her crinolined skirts while they both pretend to be absorbed into the hero’s sobs as his beloved fades into nothing and the violins swell. They shuffle out in shame midway through the credits, and Hartley resists the urge to wish the man better luck in an alternate venue. He waits until the screen goes black before he leaves, unwilling to go home but worn out from constantly traipsing Central City day after day. He resents Harry for the delay in the paperwork and resents himself for coming to this earth without all of his affairs settled. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t be the disposable one again, but it’s beginning to feel like perhaps that’s his only lot in life.

He writes, and deletes just as quickly, an I-miss-you text to Harry. Using the phones on Earth-2 makes him feel even more alien. They’re sleeker and faster than the ones he’s always used on Earth-1, but his very presence would cause dead zones were it not for the tiny chip he carries with him that stabilizes his vibrational frequency to that of this new earth. ‘Call it a goodbye gift,’ Cisco had said when he unveiled it. It had been a shocking act of generosity from someone whose baseline had always been mild antagonism, but Hartley supposes charity comes easier when you know you’ll never see the person again.

The train to go home is filled with commuters, weary and worn. They all sway with the rhythm of the car. A man at the end sleeps, head resting on his crossed arms. Two women chat conspiratorially with each other, hands clasped. A sunburned girl no older than thirteen pops her gum and scratches a mosquito bite on her leg. Hartley checks his phone periodically to see if there’s any word from Harry, but his notifications remain silent. He closes his eyes instead and listens to the hum and burble of the passengers and underneath it, the almost imperceptible hiss of the white noise of his hearing aids. He knows the movement of the train by now, knows how to read the spindling transit maps, knows which stop blossoms into which district of town. The movement soothes him and grounds him.

Jesse’s shoes are in the foyer, clearly kicked off in a moment of haste before she’d bolted upstairs. It’s a habit that she shares with Harry, the two of them forever unable to slow down enough to arrange things neatly. Hartley slides his own shoes off and lines them precisely up with the edge of the carpet, a prim pair of Oxfords waiting for tomorrow.

‘You got soup,’ says a voice from the stairs. Hartley turns to see Jesse perched on a step, studying him.

‘I got lost first,’ admits Hartley, which makes Jesse laugh.

‘Everybody does. Olga doesn’t like strangers, that’s why. Only the regulars. But thanks for sticking with it.’ She hops down the steps and rests her head on the banister. ‘You can have some, if you want.’

Hartley’s never had pelmeni soup, and he’s not sure if he’ll like it, but he acquiesces anyway, grateful to still be avoiding the prickliest parts of Jesse’s nature. It turns out to be delicious, the broth thick and rich and the dumplings, rolling and exposing their underbellies as he stirs, nearly bursting with pork and onions. Jesse glows with pride as he takes his first sip.

‘Delicious, right?’ she says.

Hartley nods, chasing a dumpling with his spoon. He wishes Harry were there to enjoy the soup with them; this all feels more comfortable and homey than he has in a long while — perhaps ever — on Earth-2, and it’s strange that it’s only the two of them. He doesn’t want to say it and ruin the moment, but he can’t shake the feeling.

‘Dad’s working, I assume,’ Jesse says, taking care of it for both of them. ‘Let me guess: he has a brilliant idea that will change the world, but if he’s home for dinner, then he’ll lose all of his inspiration.’

‘Retirement party,’ says Hartley. ‘He said he’d be home late.’

‘Well, don’t save any soup for him, then.’ There’s a tiny edge of hurt to Jesse’s voice, but her expression is placid. ‘There isn’t much left anyway.’

—

it’s long past midnight when Harry comes home, reeking of gin and far less quiet than he thinks he is. 

‘I’m awake, so you don’t have to try to tiptoe around on my account,’ Hartley says, as though Harry doesn’t sound like an elephant.

There’s the sound of a jacket being shed and casually tossed on a chair, followed by a pair of pants shimmying to the floor. Hartley winces. He knows how much that suit cost, and he also knows that Harry will leave it strewn around the bedroom all night before kicking it into a pile in the corner in the morning. He’s still mystified that the dry cleaners are able to return anything of Harry’s in pristine condition.

‘Awake is better than nearly everyone at the party.’ Harry sits on the edge of the bed and Hartley can hear the twin thumps as he peels off his socks and lobs them at the closet door. ‘Probably spent more in cab fares than we did on the drinks.’

‘Huh.’ Hartley doesn’t bother to feign interest. He feels Harry slide into bed, but he doesn’t turn to face him.

‘Plenty of speeches from Greenbaum, of course,’ Harry says through a yawn. ‘And Mrs Greenbaum, and all the junior Greenbaums.’

Hartley cuts in, ‘As thrilling as this is, can we please discuss this in the morning?’ At this particular moment, he doesn’t care about Ernie Greenbaum or any of his family members or the waves of gin fumes emanating from Harry’s side of the bed. 

Harry is drunk enough for his apology to almost sound genuinely contrite, but Hartley ignores it and shrugs off the questioning hand on his back. ‘I’m really tired,’ he says. It’s not even a complete lie. Harry moves his hand, but Hartley can feel the ghost of his touch for a long time afterwards.

—

The sun has hardly emerged over the horizon when Hartley gets up in the morning. The beep of Harry’s alarm is a long way off, and his groggy morning routine further still, so Hartley takes his time meandering through an apple, two ginger snaps, and most of the morning paper before slipping onto the back porch with a cigarette. He’d brought them over from Earth-1 and there aren’t many of his preferred brand left, so he’s been trying to save them, but it seems like the sort of day to indulge in one. 

‘Smoking is a dirty habit,’ says Harry from the doorway before Hartley has even managed to enjoy half of his cigarette.

‘Alcohol is also a dirty habit, but only one of us is hungover, so I don’t feel too bad,’ Hartley shoots back. Harry’s hangover is obviously a hellish one, but it’s cold comfort. He takes another drag and blows it ostentatiously. Harry glares at him and bangs the back door closed.

‘That won’t help your hangover,’ Hartley calls after him, but there’s no response. A few minutes later, Rosie purrs out of the driveway. Hartley can only imagine what sort of vile epithets Harry is hurling at other drivers. He finishes the cigarette, freshly energized, and heads back inside to find Jesse peeling an orange at the table.

‘What’s going on with Dad?’ she says. ‘Usually he at least says goodbye to me.’

‘He’s in a mood,’ Hartley says. ‘Ernie Greenbaum and the gin.’

Jesse sighs. ‘Typical.’ She sucks the juice out of an orange piece. ‘Look, my classes are over at one on Fridays if you, you know, want to have a late lunch or something. It’s on me.’

‘I thought we weren’t…?’ Hartley lets the question trail off.

‘It’s just a thank you for Nikita’s,’ says Jesse. ‘Besides, I guess you’re not that awful.’

Hartley dramatically places a hand to his chest. ‘O my heart, do not stand up as a witness against me.’

Jesse laughs, which surprises and pleases Hartley in equal measure. ‘Is that a yes?’

‘If I don’t get lost.’

‘If you can take the Green Line and walk half a block, even you can’t get lost.’ Jesse rustles in the junk drawer for a notepad and scribbles down an address. ‘It’s right on Russell between that awful wedding emporium and the clock shop. One-thirty okay?’

Hartley can only nod, caught in the tornado of energy that is Jesse Wells. He wonders, for the thousandth time, how they got to this point, and pinches the softest part of his hand to make sure he won’t wake up.

—

Hartley’s found his comforts in his cardigans and bowties, sharply-creased pants and his Oxfords polished just so. Not everyone on Earth-2 is so formal — he shares his seat on the train with a girl in a stained blouse and denim clamdiggers who chews her nails the entire ride, while the man across from him has left his plaid button-down untucked and one shoe untied — but he spots more than a few hats on both men and women, here and there a pair of spotless white gloves, dresses now more starch than fabric. His fashions are one of the few things he’s kept from his father, who’d spent more than a few childhood mornings inspecting him and sending him back upstairs when his clothes failed to meet Osgood’s standards. On Earth-1 he’d been deemed an overdressed, overstuffed boor, even by the standards of his prep schools and expensive, exclusive graduate programs, but here he just blends in. He inhales deeply (a mix of several perfumes, the faintest hint of body odor, someone’s heavy, vaguely unpleasant cologne) and takes a moment of gratitude for his invisibility.

The restaurant Jesse had mentioned turns out to be a tiny French-Vietnamese fusion cafe invitingly open, two tables dotting the postage-stamp patio and the radio crooning music that reminds Hartley of Édith Piaf, or the Earth-2 version of her, at least.

‘Dad swears by the crêpes, but he’s wrong. It’s bánh mì all the way,’ says a voice at Hartley’s elbow. ‘He won’t try the lemon sriracha tofu because he’s boring and old, even though it’s the best thing on the menu. Also, hi, you made it. Did you get lost this time?’

Hartley holds back a smile. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Good,’ says Jesse. ‘Come on, I’m absolutely famished. Dr. Harewood is pretty much the worst and most boring professor and I spent the last hour of class thinking about that bánh mì.’ She gestures Hartley inside, keeping up a constant stream of chatter, barely pausing to let Hartley order (‘Um, the same thing as her,’ Hartley stammers, pointing at Jesse) before she launches into a new tirade about Dr. Harewood and the idiots in her class who can’t get the most basic concepts of advanced physics. She has an unconscious habit, Hartley notices, of darting her gaze around the restaurant, always searching, always just a little bit on edge. He focuses on his bánh mì, not sure where else to look, and waits for a break in her conversation to ask her questions on her thoughts and theories. There’s not a second’s hesitation to her replies.

God, but he misses Harry right now. Jesse is so thoroughly Harry’s daughter, the same quick-thinking brain and impatience with stupidity, that it makes Hartley’s heart ache. He can feel the weight of his phone in his pocket, wishes it would buzz with a text or any sort of acknowledgment, and knows it won’t. Damn Harry. Damn his own feelings. He peppers Jesse with another question and she volleys back easily, a mischievous glint in her eye. ‘Come on, I don’t want softball questions,’ she says through a mouthful of bánh mì, handily catching a piece of tofu that’s slipped out of the baguette.

Hartley thinks for a minute before bringing up a theory he’d seen posited in one of Harry’s scientific journals, which turns into a near half-hour of sparring (‘But the ratios would need to account for the Rosetti principle,’ Jesse points out, and Hartley snaps his mouth shut and hurriedly looks up the Rosetti principle on his phone, mentally cursing yet another thing Earth-2 had found out that Earth-1 hadn’t) before they spill back onto the sidewalk, both feeling ten pounds heavier but too focused on their conversation to care.

‘The botanical garden is only a few blocks away if you haven’t been yet,’ Jesse says. ‘It’s nice enough that I’d rather be there than home while I tell you that not accounting for the fluctuation in the electron values is going to throw your proposed numbers out of whack.’

Hartley squints bitterly at her. ‘But if the electron values can’t be pinned down exactly, it renders the original calculations null and void. The entire middle third of the equation depends on being able to provide precise figures.’

‘Take a right at the light,’ says Jesse. ‘It’s obviously flawed, then.’

‘Don’t you have peer-reviewed studies on this earth?’

Jesse grins. ‘Not everyone is as smart as us.’

They chew over the formulas through most of a walk through the botanical garden. Hartley periodically interrupts to ask names of flowers he’s never seen before, feeling a little childish about it, but Jesse puffs with so much pride when she explains genera and species that he doesn’t mind so much. Hartley is crouched down by a particularly lovely bloom that turns out to be a weed when he feels his phone vibrate.

There’s a noise of disgust from Jesse. ‘Don’t bother reading it. It’s just Dad saying he won’t be home again. He sent the same thing to both of us.’

Hartley sags a little bit. He isn’t surprised, after this morning’s sniping, but he almost wants to see Harry again and try to scale at least part of the mountain of tension between them. ‘Okay,’ is all he says.

‘I can tell you the easiest way to get back home, if you want,’ Jesse says. ‘Or I was thinking of seeing this really awful movie at the Parkway Theatre. It’s about astronauts, so you know it’s going to be a whole lot of bad science. If you want to tag along, I mean, well…’

Hartley’s seen the trailer play a thousand times in between episodes of talky medical dramas (a multiversal constant, he supposes). ‘The one where people can hear each other scream in space?’

‘That’s the one. Looks terrible, doesn’t it?’ Jesse looks almost as excited at the prospect of watching an abysmal movie as she does when she lobs theoretical physics talking points back and forth.

‘Can’t be any worse than Harry’s book collection.’

Jesse giggles, sounding every inch a teenager. ‘Can I tell you something? One time I collected all those books and tried to give them to a secondhand shop and Dad found out and went in and paid them twice the asking price to make sure he got them all back.’

‘They’re all interchangeable,’ Hartley objects. ‘A whole bunch of guys with big pecs and no brains — they’re not even hot, based on the covers — and a whole bunch of women who don’t wear clothes.’

‘Tell that to Dad. He still knows all of the plots.’

‘I’ve read a few of them and they don’t even have plots.’

‘That’s what I think, too, but you know him.’

It hasn’t ceased to impress Hartley that they’re here bantering about Harry as though his relationship isn’t still the elephant in the room. He wants to ask, however stupidly, if Jesse is still uncomfortable with it all, but he does the right thing and keeps his mouth shut about it.

Jesse scrolls through her phone. ‘There’s a showing in an hour, which I think will work even if we have to take the Red Line.’ The Red Line, even Hartley knows, is perpetually overcrowded and frequently late. Its inconsistencies would have frustrated him at one point, but he likes that tiny crack of imperfection — he likes to think of it as a deliberate flaw — in Earth-2’s otherwise-infallible transit system. He nods and lets Jesse lead the way back through the botanical garden, trying to swallow down the pesky feeling that’s risen again from their teasing conversation about Harry. There’s a part of him that’s angry. It’s Friday, for God’s sake. Harry should be coming home to see his daughter and his…well, whatever Hartley is. Boyfriend. Partner. Simpleton who keeps getting his hopes up that this will all work out. He runs his finger over the edge of his phone in his pocket. He hasn’t read the original message from Harry yet. It feels like Schrödinger’s text. Until he pulls it out, it could either be a brisk ‘ _not home 2nite sry_ ’ or something with some sort of emotional nuance that Jesse had just neglected to mention. He knows, of course, what the answer is, but leaning on that potential uncertainty is enough for the moment.

—

The movie is so horrendous that both of them swear they have bruises on their arms from poking each other so many times. Jesse drags Hartley to a Mexican restaurant down the street from the Parkway — ‘I’m not hungry yet, either, but come on, chips and margaritas, at _least,’_ she insists. Hartley’s heart thuds when he hands over his false Earth-2 ID. It’s a crude thing they’d assembled before leaving Earth-1, good enough for a spot check but something that would never get past any sort of mechanical sensor. Jesse, noticing his unease, waits for the server to depart and whispers that he’s fine. ‘They really don’t even care about that stuff that much here, honestly.’

‘It’ll still be easier when I have the paperwork,’ says Hartley with a shrug. He plunges a chip into the salsa bowl.

‘At least you can leave the house,’ Jesse says, voice still hushed. ‘Dad was all insistent that I stay in the labs all the time on your Earth. His doppelgänger was a psycho, so I got to stay locked up all over again.’

Hartley winces. ‘Can we please not talk about the other Harrison?’

‘Sorry. Bad associations?’

‘Something like that,’ Hartley says, grateful to be rescued by the arrival of the margaritas. He takes the opportunity to switch the conversation to the movie they’d just watched, which Jesse seizes on with the same enthusiasm she’d had at lunch. It takes them two more baskets of chips, eventually an order of enchiladas, and perhaps an inadvisable number of margaritas before they finally agree that they should probably head home.

‘Not like Dad’s even there,’ Jesse says with the thick laughter of the very drunk. ‘Gonna go home to an empty house.’

Hartley, older, wiser, a little more capable of holding his liquor than someone who’d only hit Earth-2’s legal drinking age a year prior, helps her out of the booth, holding her steady. It’s an unusual feeling. Certainly, he’d gone home with plenty of drunken men in his time (and he’d held them upright while they puked their guts out in alleyways behind bars) but leading a post-adolescent girl down the sidewalk and towards the train is entirely new to him.

‘Left,’ directs a stumbling Jesse, still more cognizant of her surroundings than Hartley, who’s only been to this part of town a few times. ‘Then it’s a right and a left and then — ‘ she throws her hands up and Hartley has to keep her from stumbling — ‘the Red Line! But only as far as Henshaw and then we go to the Green Line and then home.’ Hartley’s not sure how he manages to get her onto the train, but he does, and she dozes off on his shoulder for a few blocks when they make it to the Green Line. He’s not sure how to politely wake her up, so he pokes her in the arm when they get close to the stop, and she jerks awake, blinking at him, and asks if something else stupid happened in the movie.

‘We’re the next stop,’ Hartley says.

‘Oh. Boring.’

Neither of them expect to see the lights on when they get home, much less Rosie parked in the driveway. ‘Dad must not have saved the world tonight,’ Jesse says, still holding onto Hartley’s arm for balance. ‘Or he saved it early. D’you think he’s even gonna notice when we come in?’

‘He’s probably in the workshop,’ says Hartley. The house’s storage is entirely relegated to the attic, as Harry’s sprawling workspace has taken over the basement.

‘Good,’ is Jesse’s rejoinder as she fumbles for the keys. ‘He gets all crabby when I even have a beer even though I’m over eighteen. It’s dumb. He only cares about the stupid things, like he hasn’t done anything bad himself.’ Hartley catches that note of sadness in her voice again.

Jesse rests a hand with an iron grip on Hartley’s shoulder as she wiggles out of her shoes; Hartley neatly slides out of his and nudges both pairs into place on the foyer rug. ‘Kitchen,’ he directs.

Harry, to the enjoyment of neither Hartley nor Jesse, emerges from the living room and casts a critical stare at both of them. ‘Were you two drinking?’

‘Oh, lay off, Dad,’ Jesse groans. ‘It’s Friday and you’re supposed to be working anyway, so what do you care?’ She heads for the kitchen, Hartley still keeping her vertical.

‘I care because you’re my daughter and you smell like tequila,’ Harry says, following them to the kitchen.

‘And I’m legally allowed to drink,’ says Jesse. She fumbles for a glass and Hartley hurriedly rescues it before she knocks several off the shelf. He’s had enough margaritas himself that he’s surprised at his own coordination.

‘You can barely stand up!’

Jesse braces herself against the counter and glares at her father. ‘Yeah, well, I’m young and I want to live my life and have fun so I don’t end up like you.’

Harry looks alternately stricken and furious and Hartley wants nothing more than to flee the room. He’d been in the middle of his parents’ ugly arguments before and he’d hated it. His own fights, he’s more than happy to pick, and his own grudges, he’s more than happy to hold. But this — this is Jesse’s fight, and he wants to stay out of it.

‘You’re so clueless,’ Jesse says, words slurred, the sorrow cleaving her voice. ‘You’re all upset that I’m drunk and you don’t care about anything else. Y’re hardly ever at home anymore, and then when you are you want to just yell at me. Remember when we first got back and we’d cook dinner or watch TV or talk just be normal? Now you can’t even do that much. Whenever I want to have fun, you act like you have to be all overprotective because of Zoom, but you never even bothered to figure out why I was upset. You never listened because you just figured you knew everything already. You only care that it made you feel bad, not because of what happened to me.’ She sweeps the empty water glass off the counter in one swift motion — a classic Wells move, Hartley notes inanely, incongruously — and leaves the kitchen with as much shaky dignity as she can.

‘Jesse!’ Harry dashes after her.

Hartley, head swimming from both alcohol and argument, goes to find the broom, stepping delicately around the most visible pieces of glass. He can’t tell if it’s his own hearing or the silence in the kitchen that makes the crackles and crunches as he sweeps seem that much louder, but it sounds as though he’s emptying thunderclaps into the trashcan. He leans the broom against the table and slumps down in a chair. He isn’t sure how badly things are going upstairs, and he doesn’t want to know. A cigarette won’t settle his nerves — a pack of cigarettes won’t settle them — but Hartley finds one anyway and goes out to the back porch. It burns long, low, past the filter, burns his fingers, and he hardly even notices. The night goes chilly and surprisingly still. Hartley sets the porch swing to a gentle rock and holds the cigarette pack in his uninjured hand, thinking, considering.

—

When he goes inside, Hartley strains to hear if there’s any conversation upstairs. The lack of shouting is promising, but he still doesn’t want to walk in on any private discussions. He pours himself a few glasses of water, the faucet trickling at its lowest setting, then pads through the kitchen as quietly as possible, turning lights off, one ear cocked towards the steps. Once he’s assured of the silence, he slips up the stairs — oh, he’s so good at this, disappearing from all those parental arguments he remembers — and into the guest room. Harry has enough to deal with tonight, and frankly, Hartley has no desire to deal with his temper, either. He methodically strips down to his underwear, hanging his cardigan and trousers in the closet, folding his bowtie on the dresser, balling up his socks and shirt for tomorrow’s laundry. Everything in its place, so far from Harry’s sprawling messes.

The sheets are cool as he turns them down, and Hartley runs his hand over them. He’s slept alone plenty of nights since moving here, but a bed that isn’t Harry’s still feels strange. When they’d first begun sleeping together — it’s casual, they’d both insisted, it won’t ever be more — Hartley had always followed his habits of forcing Harry to leave right afterwards. He’d hated waking up next to someone. Other men were useful only for the act, and then Hartley wanted nothing to do with them. His father had caught him with the son of a diplomat at one of his corporate events, slapped him, called him a whore and a faggot, and Hartley had only leaned into the names after being thrown out. Cheap flings from the bar, one-night stands, grimy bathroom blowjobs. Harry wasn’t supposed to be any different. He’d had Harrison’s face, for God’s sake. Hartley squeezes his eyes closed. He doesn’t like thinking too deeply about what he and Harrison had had, what they’d done. There are still a few rippled areas of scarred skin that Hartley tries not to touch, that he’s never explained to Harry.

But Harry isn’t Harrison, or at least Hartley wants to think that. He doesn’t want to buy into the idea that he could be so foolish as to fall for the same cruel trick — from the same cruel face — twice. But they’d had so many moments of warmth and (Hartley squirms at the thought of using the word) something akin to love that no one else had ever bothered to offer. It had been a relationship hard-fought. Harry had had an inexhaustible energy to fight, and Hartley had been more than happy to challenge him at every turn. Even after the screaming matches that had ended in Harry’s staying the night, Hartley had forced him to sleep on the sofa the first few times before he’d finally acquiesced to sharing a bed. And now his heart hurts for this empty bed and the affection he and Harry had had back on Earth-1.

Hartley hates himself for his selfishness. The amount of pain Jesse is in far outstrips anything he could be feeling, and yet he’s only focused on himself. He climbs into bed and stretches his arm out to the unoccupied side, forcing himself to feel the gulf. It’s late anyway. He should sleep.

—

‘Why didn’t you come to bed last night?’ Harry is in the doorway, leaning in a way that makes him look even lankier than usual.

Hartley shifts in bed and reaches for his glasses, searching for a convincing lie. He settles on a semi-truth: ‘I thought you’d want privacy.’ His head aches, despite the water he’d had last night. His own fault for trusting tequila, he assumes.

‘Because of Jesse?’ Harry hasn’t moved.

Hartley wants to put the pillow over his head, partially due to the morning light and partially to shut out the conversation. ‘I guess.’

Harry sighs. ‘Jesse is fine, more or less. She’ll be up later.’ Hartley can hear him crossing the floor, and then there’s the pressure of another body getting into the bed. ‘Are you…?’

Hartley, sick at heart, lonely, head furiously pounding, very slowly rolls over to face Harry. The light is too much to keep his eyes open, and he’s relieved when Harry pulls him into his arms and he can bury his face in Harry’s shirt. Harry runs his hands over Hartley’s bare back, and Hartley resists the urge to flinch when he touches one of the scars.

‘Jesse was right,’ Harry says softly into Hartley’s hair. ‘I have been clueless. I hurt both of you. I wasn’t around to be supportive the way you two needed me to be. There were a lot of mistakes I made, and I need to learn from them.’

Hartley shifts. ‘Jesse’s the one you should be worried about, not me.’

‘And we had a very, very long talk last night,’ Harry responds, tracing a circle on Hartley’s skin with his thumb. ‘She’s asleep right now, as she should be.’

‘Still.’ Hartley can’t find it in himself to pull out of Harry’s embrace, but he’s trying to keep the rest of his emotions in check. His own issues aren’t the focus right now.

‘Hartley.’ Harry sounds weary. ‘Don’t do this. I can care about the both of you at the same time.’

‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’ Hartley’s voice is muffled in Harry’s shirt, and he wonders if Harry can even make out the tone of it.

‘You’re not, and I know you’re not,’ Harry says, tightening his arms around Hartley. ‘None of us are.’

All the jagged, jumbled pieces inside Hartley are shifting, changing, pressing at him. He wants to argue with Harry, tell him that his relationship with Jesse is infinitely more important and that Hartley is more than capable of existing by himself, but he’s also so tired of existing by himself and of fighting and of being frightened of the alternative. ‘I thought things were going to be easier here,’ he says finally.

Harry gives a wry, sad chuckle. ’Give it time. We’ll get there.’

—

Hartley doesn’t even want to check the time when he wakes up again. His headache hasn’t lifted and his mouth is dry, but he’s still ensconced in Harry’s arms and facing away from the window and its cursed sun. 

‘Both of you needed the sleep, I see,’ he hears Harry say. He sounds more awake than usual, and Hartley wonders if he’s been lying there to avoid waking Hartley up.

Hartley makes a herculean effort to wriggle free. ‘Is it late?’

‘It’s technically the afternoon. I thought you’d only sleep that late if someone sedated you.’

‘That was your fault,’ Hartley huffs. ‘I would have gotten up.’ He’s trying to get up now, but the bed is terribly inviting and his headache is just plain terrible.

Harry gives him a helpful nudge upright. ‘Second shelf of the medicine cabinet. Green bottle. It’ll clear the hangover up within the hour.’

‘I guess you’d know,’ Hartley grumbles as he staggers to the bathroom. He wishes the margaritas hadn’t been as good as they were, or that he’d had more restraint. ‘ _Ancipiti plus ferit ense gula,_ ’ he tells his wretched-looking reflection. Gluttony kills more than the sword.

‘You look horrible,’ Harry says cheerfully when Hartley makes his way back into the bedroom. Hartley hates him in this moment for having already run his hangover gauntlet. ‘I brought you some clothes. Get dressed so you can eat.’

Hartley groans and sinks onto the bed, fumbling for his shirt. ‘You have a very finite amount of sympathy.’

‘True,’ Harry agrees. ‘Put your pants on.’

He burns the toast only a little bit, the way Hartley likes it, and Hartley feels himself redden slightly.

‘Jesse had a five-month jelly toast phase as a child. Hard not to notice how people like their toast now,’ Harry says.

Hartley smiles, even though doing it makes him feel as though his head is going to split in two. ‘That sounds like her. Is she…doing alright?’

‘Relative term,’ Jesse says, stumbling into the kitchen and collapsing on a chair. She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. ‘Dad, do you have any of those hangover pills? And no I-told-you-sos?’

Harry very gently ruffles her hair. ‘Good morning to you, too.’

‘I hate tequila,’ Jesse says once Harry has left. ‘I hate all alcohol. I’m never drinking again.’

‘At least you worked things out with your dad,’ Hartley ventures. ‘I think.’

‘Kinda. Sorta.’ Jesse doesn’t sound entirely sure. ‘He said he’s gonna help me find someone to talk to — a psychiatrist, I mean. Somebody who won’t leak the story.’

’That’s something.’ Privately, Hartley isn’t sure if it is. His father had always railed against psychiatrists, saying that anyone who needed to see one was a weak-minded failure. He’d like to assume that, as with most things, Osgood Rathaway had been backwards and wrong, but the idea had been so stringently drilled into his head that it’s still difficult to shake.

Jesse makes a noncommittal noise. ‘I hope.’

‘Two pills and no judgment,’ Harry says, every gesture carefree as he drops the pills into Jesse’s hand and sets down a glass of water. Hartley winces. Even though the pills are gnawing away the edges of his headache, he still doesn’t understand how Harry is moving so fluidly.

Jesse tosses them back and shudders. ‘Gross. I’m going back to bed. Never wake me up again.’

‘You’ll be alright, Jess-Jess,’ Harry says to her retreating back. There is no response.

Hartley takes another bite of toast. Circumstances aside, he’s glad to see Harry and Jesse talking again. It reignites that faint glimmer of hope he had almost thought had been forever snuffed out over the last few weeks.

‘And you’re not dead yet, either, so that’s promising,’ Harry observes. ‘Making a mess with those crumbs, though.’

Hartley shakes his toast over the plate to shed even more crumbs. The movement sends a dull throb into his right eye, which he tries to ignore. ‘I thought it would feel more familiar for you.’

They go out to the living room when he finishes, Hartley curled up with his head on Harry’s lap and Harry absent-mindedly stroking his hair while he reads an article on advancements in gene splicing. Hartley can feel the pills working their magic, or maybe it’s just being here with Harry that’s helping. He runs a finger along the seam of Harry’s pajamas. ‘Did you mean it when you said none of us are okay?’

Harry sets down the article. ‘Jesse told me about her runs, and I’ve heard you get up in the middle of the night more than a few times.’

‘What about you?’

There’s a very long pause. Harry’s hands still for a moment, and Hartley is worried that he’s said the wrong thing. At long last, Harry speaks again, but all he says is, ‘How’s your headache?’

—

Meeting for bánh mì becomes a Friday tradition. ‘No margaritas, though,’ Jesse promises. They chat about inanities — classes, television shows, all the places around town that Hartley’s never heard of but that Jesse swears are unmissable. She drags him through a thousand shops, through museums and history centers (‘Close your mouth so you don’t look like a total tourist,’ she hisses when they pause at a S.T.A.R. Labs display, but she’s smiling), through the bustling high-rises of downtown and the placid calm of the lakes. She occasionally makes an offhand reference to Dr. Hiroshi, the psychiatrist she’s begun to see, who Hartley can already tell is having a positive effect.

There are fewer nights without Harry now. Hartley gets used to dinner being late, but Harry’s trying, at least, and it gives Hartley the chance to start expanding his cooking repertoire. Jesse pulls out a fat stack of cookbooks and starts him on the basics.

‘You pick it up when it’s just you,’ she explains, juggling ham, Gruyere, and butter in one hand. ‘Can you get me a skillet from the cabinet? Bottom left.’

They start with croque monsieur, the first of which Hartley badly burns while Jesse is washing salad greens and shovels into the trashcan but the others of which he deems passable enough. Jesse teases him mercilessly for the fallen croque monsieur, humming a funeral dirge while they tear spinach and tatsoi. ‘Do you think you can boil some eggs, or is that beyond you?’ she asks him. Hartley makes a face at her.

He likes the rhythm of cooking, once he begins to understand it: the noises of the tearing leaves and the gentle knock of the eggs against one another in the water, the sizzle of the Gruyere when a thread slips down the side of the bread and onto the skillet, the swift vanishing of the butter as it melts. He cracks the hard-boiled eggs and slides their shells off in spindly webs, burying the burned croque monsieur under an ignominious grave of white. ‘Slicer in the drawer, third from right,’ directs Jesse, chopping pecans in a blur. 

‘It’s almost like you trust me not to cut my hand off,’ Hartley says in a tone of fake awe.

‘If you cut your hand off in an egg slicer, then there’s no hope for you,’ Jesse counters, sprinkling pecans over the salad.

Hartley shrugs. ‘First time for everything.’

He has to admit, the dinner isn’t bad, and it’s nice to have the three of them around the table again. Harry’s croque monsieur oozes so much cheese that he ends up licking it off his fingers. Hartley, for Jesse’s sake, tries not to stare.

They’ve set a post-dinner routine: Hartley in the curve of Harry’s arm on the sofa, Jesse sprawled in an armchair, while they watch a series of procedurals that Harry adores and about which Hartley and Jesse crack constant disparaging comments. It’s a bit of a jarring experience when Hartley sees the faces of people he knew on Earth-1 showing up on his television screen in acting roles. He’s been getting more used to it with time, but watching his childhood dentist serve as a murder victim of the week throws him for a loop.

Jesse’s phone dings with a text midway through the first episode of the night, and she goes ashen, then furious, and taps out a reply with such ferocity it’s as though she’s hoping to put her finger through the phone itself.

‘Oh, no. Ohhhhh, no,’ she says when a reply comes through. ‘Those bastards.' 

‘Jesse!’ admonishes Harry, who Hartley has heard using much, much worse.

‘It’s the _Planeteer_. It’s deserved,’ Jesse says through gritted teeth. She types again and mumbles a few more profanities under her breath. ‘I cannot believe this. I mean, I can, because it’s them, but…oh, are you kidding me?’

Harry tosses his glasses on the coffee table and sighs. ‘How bad is it?’

‘See for yourself,’ Jesse retorts, holding out her phone. ‘They really didn’t even try with the headline.’

Hartley cranes his head to read whatever the offending headline is and blanches. WELLS, WHAT DO WE HAVE HERE? he can read, mostly because the typeface is enormous, and enough of the picture underneath it shows for him to recognize it as the visit he and Jesse had just made to the art museum. He’d stupidly been leaning in close to better hear Jesse explain something about the sculpture they’d been looking at. He groans and sinks further into the couch cushions.

‘Looks like love is in the air for Jesse Wells, daughter of so-called Central City savior Harrison Wells,’ Harry reads with disgust. ‘Photogs spotted her canoodling with a mystery man…’

‘Photogs spotted her trying to live a normal life,’ Jesse spits. ‘Now people are texting me asking me why I didn’t tell them I have a boyfriend.’

‘I’ll make some calls.’ Harry shifts Hartley off of him.

Jesse slumps lower in the armchair. ‘Why can’t they just go under? Everything they print is such a load of crap.’

Hartley scrolls through the article, his stomach sinking. There are more pictures throughout — nothing untoward, just two people platonically enjoying each other’s company — but he knows the shots are vague enough to spin some grand romance from. He doesn’t even want to read the text that accompanies it. It’s all exploitative, falsified garbage, with a prominent quote from a body language expert right in the middle. He wants to set the _Planeteer_ offices on fire.

Another text pings: _Since when did ur dad let u date?? Text me w deets ASAP!!_

‘I don’t even want to know what it says.’ Jesse has her arm thrown over her eyes. ‘And Dad’s probably yelling at some lawyers right now, so that’s just great.’

Hartley finds himself apologizing. ‘I didn’t know they’d start following you.’

‘Yeah, well, neither did I. And now everybody’s gonna ask me a million questions about it. Whatever. I’m just gonna tell them you’re a family friend. It’s not even really a lie.’

Jesse sounds angrier than anything else. Hartley wonders if she’s had run-ins with the _Planeteer_ before. He knows that Harry’s confrontations have ended in bitterly-fought lawsuits, and he’d learned early which tabloids had enough legitimacy to be considered acceptable reading. The _Planeteer_ had been spoken of in Harry’s most scathing tone. Looking at this article, Hartley understands why.

‘They’ll get someone on it in the morning,’ Harry says, tossing his phone down on the table with a clatter and narrowly missing his glasses.

‘Dad, can you just…not? We’ve talked about this. If you sue them, it’ll just make things worse. Remember the whole ‘can we be a normal family’ thing? Can we please do that just this once?’

Harry tries to object, but Jesse gives him a murderous stare until he sighs, shrugs, and picks up his phone to call off his legal dogs.

On the sofa, Hartley wishes he could just vanish into thin air. He’s not foolish enough to think that he’s now likely to be stopped on the street for an ‘Aren’t you the guy who…?’, but it still makes his stomach turn over that his face is plastered online when he still doesn’t technically exist on this earth.

‘Look, I’m just going to go for a run or something,’ Jesse says. ‘Maybe if I’m lucky, I can make eye contact with a guy and the _Planeteer_ can run a thousand words tomorrow about how I’m pregnant with his baby.’

Harry catches her in a hug as she tries to escape the living room. ‘The _Planeteer_ is run by idiots, honey.’

‘I know. Sorry for stealing your boyfriend, though.’

Hartley waits until Jesse’s disappeared upstairs to find her running clothes before he says, with forced casualness, how proud his father would be if he actually _were_ dating a girl. ‘I think,’ he amends. ‘As long as he could spin it to some sort of business advantage.’ He isn’t even sure why he’s talking about his father now — perhaps as some misguided attempt to twist the knife. This whole debacle with Jesse and the _Planeteer_ is his fault, after all. The thoughts are crowding his brain: that he’s ruined everything, that he should have expected as much, that everyone who’d rejected him over the years had had the right idea.

‘Stop that,’ snaps Harry. They’ve been down this road, had this same argument, before. Harry’s told him time and time again that Osgood was wrong and that his actions don’t mean that Hartley is a terrible person, but tonight Hartley’s content to disregard that.

‘I’m right,’ he shrugs. ‘Or he’s right, I should say. He told me I’d always be an embarrassment, and now I’ve accomplished that on two worlds, one of which I don’t even exist on.’

Harry runs his hands through his hair. ‘Hartley, I’m trying to get everything together as fast as I can. Todd’s been working day and night to make it happen, but he can only work so fast and there are plenty of moving parts.’

‘Graduating from invisibly worthless to worthless with a paper trail,’ Hartley says.

‘There’s just no winning with you, is there?’ Harry shoots back. Hartley knows he’s barely keeping his temper in check. ‘The _Planeteer_ is the lowest form of trash. Hardly a person in this city mistakes their slop for actual reporting. People probably think the photos are doctored.’

‘You were the one who immediately called a lawyer!’ shouts Hartley. ‘How else am I supposed to react?’

‘They went after Jesse, and they went after you,’ Harry says. ‘They go after me, fine. They go after the labs, fine. We have people who will sort it all out. But I don’t want them going after you two.’

‘Oh, yes. Protect the privacy of your daughter and your illegal kept boy.’ This is the sort of messy, unfocused argument that Osgood would have berated him for. Hartley hates himself more and more with every word that comes out of his mouth, but he’s already so deep into this that there’s no backing out now. There’s a thousand pinpricks of frustration and upset jabbing at him now: his father, the paperwork, the struggles to assimilate on Earth-2, the _Planeteer_ , a lump of nebulous envy he doesn’t want to pick apart. All the fears that he’ll never escape this cycle of soaring too high, believing in something good, before he brings it all crashing back down to earth. His family. Harrison. Team Flash. Now this. There had always been something missing in him that kept him from being anything more than a stopgap measure. Good enough, until. All of these seething, roiling failures that make up who he is.

Harry scoffs. ‘Don’t be stupid. You’re not a kept boy, for God’s sake. It’ll take another couple of weeks, max. We’re almost to the end of it.’

Hartley smothers a retort that there’s no amount of paperwork that’s going to fix him. He won’t let this escalate further. He’ll shove the rest of it down. That’s what he’s always done. What’s always worked. ‘Fine,’ he manages to say, feeling as though the word will choke him. Everything feels stifling and small, and he can’t be here any longer for fear of exploding. ‘I’m going out.’

There’s a drugstore a few blocks from the house, with a shining gold-and-glass display of cigarette brands Hartley’s never heard of and that he’s never tried. He traces over the edge of the neatly-folded bills in his pocket as he walks. He’s half-expected Harry to follow him out of the house or to summon him back, but there’s no shout behind him and his phone remains resolutely silent. He spends too much money on a pack of Turkish cigarettes with a rough beachside image on the front. They’re not as harsh as the ones he usually smokes, but there’s a spicy note to them that he likes. Hartley sits on a bench by the drugstore and smokes two in a row, letting the nicotine calm him. His phone dings, and he lets the message go unread until he finishes the second cigarette, leisurely and slow.

_U cmng home?_ his phone reads. Hartley waits for several minutes before finally sending a simple: _Yes._ He shoves his phone back in his pocket and ignores the replies.

—

Hartley takes the long way home, needlessly criss-crossing streets, lingering for a few minutes at a park empty for the night, detouring towards the Green Line and turning around halfway there. The lights are still on when he gets home. He wonders if Jesse’s already back from her run, but he can’t see her bedroom from the front of the house.

He feels like a rebellious teenager sneaking back into the house, unlocking the door and slipping inside as quietly as possible, to no avail. Harry is waiting for him already.

‘Can we talk?’

Hartley hates that tone of soft concern. He gives Harry a crooked smile and offers, ‘Maybe later? It was kind of warm out tonight, so I’d like to go shower.’

‘Jesse used to use the same tactic when she was thirteen, and it didn’t work then,’ Harry says.

‘Well, I’m not Jesse and I’m not thirteen, so I don’t need you to try to parent me,’ Hartley retorts.

‘You bolted from the house mid-conversation,’ Harry says. ‘Clearly, things aren’t fine, so what is it? It’s more than just the paperwork.’

‘Oh, just leave it, would you?’ Hartley works his foot out of his shoe and sends the Oxford into the wall with a satisfying thump. The other one hits so hard it leaves a small scrape on the paint.

Harry folds his arms and sighs. ‘No, because — even though it seems that you don’t want me to — I care about you and I’d like to figure out what’s going on.’

‘You’re smart. Figure it out yourself.’

Whatever temper Harry’s been holding in check isn’t being held in very well any longer. ‘Always a fight with you, isn’t it? I’m not around, you’re angry about it. I’m around, you’re angry about it. I don’t talk to you about something, it’s a problem. I try to talk to you, you shut down and run away.’

Hartley stares down at his Oxfords, lying haphazardly on their sides, and says nothing. He’d fostered this argument into existence, and now he doesn’t even want to continue it.

‘Hartley. Look at me, please.’ It’s not a command, but a request (a plea, almost), entirely without pretense. No one’s ever said Hartley’s name the way Harry does, and it makes his stomach turn in ways he can’t define. He flicks his eyes up to Harry, briefly, and goes back to looking at the floor. He can feel Harry’s fingers lifting his chin up, and he shifts his gaze to the edge of a picture frame.

Harry says, in that same gentle tone, ‘Will you please let me help you?’ Hartley wants to pull away, but he’s frozen in that spot, every touch of Harry’s like electric on his skin.

‘I don’t need anyone’s help.’

‘You know that’s not true.’ Harry smooths back a loose strand of Hartley’s hair, a gesture so kind Hartley thinks he could crack open where he stands and spill all the ugly things that are plaguing him. But he knows better than that, and he steels himself, searching for something appropriately biting to say.

Instead, all that comes out is, ‘Don’t you have to work tomorrow?’ He meets Harry’s eyes when he says it, keeps the set of his jaw determined, and tries to squelch his reaction to the naked sadness on Harry’s face.

Harry’s hand drops and he steps away; the sadness vanishes and replaces with placidity. ‘You should brush your teeth before you come to bed. Those cigarettes are strong.’

—

_It’s not Friday, but do you want to get lunch today? Skipping microbiology. It’s boring anyway._

Hartley writes back: _Are you sure?_

_About what? Microbiology or lunch? Yes to both. Bio’s easy credits and I want to try this new diner. I don’t care if the Planeteer sees, either_.

After a moment’s hesitation, Hartley gives in. It’s been almost a week since the pictures were in the paper anyway and aside from the nosy texts from Jesse’s college friends, the maybe-romantic exploits of a 19-year-old genius seem to have disappeared from the public consciousness.

The diner is one of those squat art deco cylinders that would have been kitschy on Earth-1 but seems right at home on Earth-2. Hartley spots Jesse in a booth, a paper waiter’s hat tilted jauntily over her ponytail. ‘Hurry up, you’re late,’ she calls, waving him over. ‘Apparently, you have to try the gumbo, so I ordered us both some. I hope you don’t hate gumbo.’

‘Just the sort of thing a caring girlfriend would do,’ Hartley says.

Jesse wrinkles her nose. ‘I thought we’d be engaged by now. Maybe you don’t really love me after all.’ 

‘I’d never break up with a girl before lunch.’

‘Well, here’s the food, so you won’t have long to wait,’ says Jesse as the waiter slides two steaming bowls and a loaf of crusty sourdough onto the table. Shrimp and sausage jostle happily for position against the okra, lipping the bowls’ edges. All the expensive corporate dinners Hartley had been to with his parents as part of Rathaway Industries events had never been quite so satisfying as these lunches. He makes a futile play for one of the shrimp with his spoon.

Jesse, through a mouthful of gumbo, informs him that she’s quelled most of the questions from her friend circle. ‘Veronica thinks you’re cute, but I told her you don’t like girls and I broke her heart,’ she says. ‘Everybody just thinks you’re an old friend of the family from overseas, though.’

‘What about everyone else?’

‘The _Planeteer_ has also claimed that Dad once injected me with experimental serums to improve my intelligence — he sued over that one, mostly because I was nine — and that he falsified my high school final exams so I could graduate early. People don’t really tend to believe their stuff anymore, but it’s still frustrating to know they were following us around for weeks to get those shots.’

‘I was surprised you wanted to meet up today,’ Hartley admits, and Jesse makes a dismissive noise.

‘I mean, the _Planeteer_ is stupid and I hate them, but Dr. Hiroshi and I talk a lot about not letting stuff hold me back if I want to move on.’

Hartley shifts uncomfortably. ‘That’s pretty pat advice.’

‘It’s a simplification of it,’ says Jesse with a shrug. ‘I don’t just go in there for her to tell me one-liners and then everything gets fixed. We talk about a lot of stuff and do a lot of work and it takes a lot of time.’

Hartley stirs his gumbo for a few moments and asks if she can elaborate on the idea. It just sounds unrealistic to him, to be able to cut the strings from the past and move forward.

‘Well, I mean…it kind of starts with this idea that you look at stuff in pieces. There’s you and then there’s a bad thing that’s happened to you and then there’s how you reacted to it. And you have to learn how all of those pieces can exist together without hurting you, and so you have to look at everything from a distance and not judge it, only observe it, and eventually you can wear it down to a point where you can be okay with it. So a lot of that is also doing things that scare you or remind you of a traumatic event because then you’re taking the pieces that could hurt you and telling them they’re not so dangerous. It kind of makes you feel more confident and then it gets easier. Does that make sense?’

‘It does,’ says Hartley. Privately, he still can’t imagine it would work — not for him, at least. But then, few things ever do.

—

Jesse goes over to Veronica’s that night to study (’Study,’ snorts Harry). It’s the first night that it’s just been Harry and Hartley since the _Planeteer_ story broke — they’ve been frosty to each other in private and only putting on a cheerful front when Jesse’s around — and Hartley isn’t sure what to expect. He tries to read the La Bruyère he’d picked up for a dime at the bookstore, but his French vocabulary keeps escaping him, and he finally gives up. Harry’d vanished after dinner into his office to, he had said, work on some forms he’d had to bring home, but when Hartley peers inside, La Bruyère still in hand, he’s only taking apart a pen piece by piece. Three other dismantled ones are already strewn over the desk.

‘Hard at work,’ he comments.

Harry rolls the entire affair into a trashcan into one fluid motion. ‘It walks, it talks, it crawls on its belly like a reptile. I thought you were still having one of your moods. Or were you paid to talk to me?’

Hartley ignores the dig. ‘There’s a line in this,’ he says, holding up the book _,_ ‘about false greatness and true greatness — that false greatness only survives through illusions and hiding, and true greatness is free and kind and lets itself be touched without losing anything. I thought you’d find it interesting.’

‘Mm,’ says Harry noncommittally. ‘Why is that?’

This is the crossroads, Hartley knows. Once he opens the floodgates, he won’t be able to close them again. He swallows, hard, and bites his lip to the point of pain before he speaks again. ‘There are a lot of things I need to tell you about.’

He doesn’t even know where to start, so he lets it all out in one rapid-fire mess, circling back on itself, repeating himself, skipping from topic to topic with segues that hardly make sense in his own head. He doesn’t look at Harry during any of it, ashamed of himself for so many of the things he’s saying, vaguely aware that he’s crying at one point, but just barreling on heedlessly. At one point, he can hear Harry stand up, and he holds his hands up, warding Harry away. ‘I want to finish,’ he says. There are still things he hasn’t said, and he doubts he’ll ever have the courage to say them again.

‘Hartley, you’ve said enough. You’re just punishing yourself at this point,’ Harry says, taking a step closer. ‘You don’t owe me the story of every terrible thing that’s ever happened to you.’

‘Or because of me,’ Hartley says.

‘We’ve all done awful things. That’s not a reason to drag yourself through the mud of all of them at once. 

‘Bit late for that now. It’s all out there, and you got what you wanted.’ Hartley can feel the bitterness creeping into his voice now and the noxious churn of guilt. That didn’t take long, he notes to himself.

‘No,’ says Harry. ‘Wanting you to actually talk to me isn’t the same as driving yourself to the edge of a nervous breakdown.’

‘It didn’t bother me. I’m fine.’

‘I’m not stupid, Hartley. I know when you’re lying to me.’

Hartley tightens his grip on the volume of La Bruyère he’s still holding. True greatness, he thinks, lets itself be touched and handled. It loses nothing by being seen at close quarters. He closes his eyes, lets the book fall. ‘Please,’ he says.

—

It’s a strange, surreal night; Hartley isn’t sure what he’s only imagined and what’s real any longer. He thinks Harry had held him, but he can’t recall. His hands had trembled when he’d tried to drink that chamomile tea, hadn’t they? And the steps had been impossibly long on the way upstairs. He’d undressed in front of the mirror, he knows, because he remembers spotting one of Harrison’s scars on his arm and the nausea lurching. He hadn’t even felt like he was looking at his own body, but someone else’s, but it had pained him all the same. Was there conversation? Hartley remembers Harry saying something to him, but he thinks he’d just shaken his head. _I can’t hear you_ , he’d wanted to say, but it had been as though he’d run out of words after they’d left the office.

Hartley’s head feels leaden when he wakes up in the morning, the other side of the bed long since gone cold. There’s a note on the dresser in Harry’s messy, angular scrawl: _Sorry, early meetings. Back tonight. H._ No reference to last night, no well-wishes. Hartley is grateful for that. He wants to put all of it into a box and shove it into the dusty recesses of his mind and never think of it again.

But he can’t. The gratitude doesn’t erase his hyper-awareness of himself and all of the things he’d said, all of the habits he knows he’s created in reaction to everyone around him. He turns the shower on as hot as he can stand it, then beyond, and lets the water run over him until it goes icy on his reddened skin. He wants to wash all of the worst parts of himself down the drain and see what’s left, if there even is anything.

His father had always expected him to be better, stronger, smarter than everyone else. Rathaways had never needed someone else unless it was someone they could use to their advantage. Hartley stands in the bedroom, weighing his phone in his hand. Everything he’s ever learned tells him not to call Harry, and doing it feels absurdly, comically difficult. It rings once, twice, so long that Hartley thinks it’ll go to voicemail, before Harry picks up. ‘Hartley?’

Hartley hesitates. ‘I know you’re busy, but…I need to see you.’ He sounds so weak and pathetic and foolish, his voice practically cracking.

There’s a series of clicks and paper shuffles on the other end of the line. ‘I’ll tell Beth to move things around, alright? I’ll be home as soon as I can.’

Hartley meets him on the steps. He’s a mess — hair half-combed, dressed only in pajamas again — and Harry’s office polish and poise seem even more pronounced in comparison. Hartley wants to be mature, but he fairly tumbles down the stairs and into Harry’s arms, almost knocking him backwards.

‘I’ve hardly got the door shut,’ Harry protests, but he doesn’t let go of Hartley, either. ‘Are you alright?’

There had been a period of a few years when Hartley was young where he’d been prone to getting sick. No bug had swept through his prep school without taking its pound of flesh, and he recalls more than a few days he’d spent lying on the infirmary bed while the nurse had dialed his parents to come pick him up again. They’d never come — his father was traveling or in a meeting or couldn’t be bothered, and his mother had always been at some social event or too busy with running the household — and he’d gotten familiar with the face of his father’s driver, Miles, instead, who’d bundle him into the backseat with a fistful of bags and remind him that he needed to keep the car spotless, but would occasionally give his shoulder a squeeze and tell him it wouldn’t be long before they’d be home.

It had been Miles, too, who’d driven him off the grounds of his parents’ home after he’d been thrown out, standing stiffly at attention when he opened the car door and Hartley had stepped out with the lone suitcase he’d packed. ‘Sir,’ Miles had said, from force of habit, and then he’d gone distantly formal: told Hartley he was no longer welcome at the Rathaway home or offices; there was to be no contact between him and either Osgood or Rachel (not ‘your parents,’ of course — he’d left that title for them behind); that there was a small stipend in a separate bank account for his relocation, but that all other accounts and permissions were no longer accessible. He’d handed Hartley the account information and it was all Hartley had been able to do not to tear the paper into tiny pieces and throw it in Miles’ face. There was a Latin proverb he had learned early on that had always aligned with Osgood’s life philosophies: _Ne quid expectes amicos; quod tute agere possis —_ Expect nothing from friends; do what you can do yourself. He’d taken the money that time and promised himself never again. Hartley had stood and watched the taillights of Osgood’s limousine disappear into the night, leaving him alone and exposed, and he’d steeled himself against the world.

And oh, he’d thought he had been good at it, but first there had been Harrison, whose crumbs of attention he’d been so hungry for, and now there’s Harry, who seems blithely unconcerned that Hartley’s balled-up fists are wrinkling his suit. Harry, who’d picked up the phone and come home. Hadn’t sent someone else in his place. Hartley shakes his head — no, he’s not alright, doesn’t really know what the baseline for alright even is, but knows he’s nowhere close to it — and he lets Harry stroke the still-damp hair at the nape of his neck and murmur reassurances into his ear.

Harry asks if he wants to talk and Hartley shakes his head again. He’s done enough talking for a lifetime now, and he’s all wrung out. ‘I just…I missed you.’ It sounds insipid now that it’s out there, but he means it. Just having Harry here is pulling him back down to earth, steadying him. He breathes in the scent of Harry’s cologne, loosens his grip, lets the tension drain from his body. ‘I didn’t expect you to show up, though.’

‘I could always leave,’ offers Harry. ‘Plenty of press releases to authorize and products to test back at the labs.’

They end up, instead, in their usual spots on the sofa, Hartley resting his head on Harry’s shoulder while they order Thai takeout and a soap opera plays quietly on the television. Hartley had trailed Harry upstairs as he shed his workday clothes and, in a rare concession, left his watch on the dresser. He can see the line, slightly paler, where it had been, and he runs his fingers over the smooth bare skin of Harry’s inner wrist.

They spread the food over the coffee table, squabbling amiably over the last pattaya shrimp and the remnants of the panang curry. Harry threads his fingers through Hartley’s hair, and Hartley nestles closer in response. They sit in silence so long that Hartley goes comfortably drowsy, interrupted only by Harry asking him if he wants to go upstairs. Hartley yawns and nods and unwinds himself, muscles protesting with stiffness.

He lets Harry undress him — slowly, his hands exploring every inch of skin with reverence — and tilts his face up for the feather-light kisses Harry traces over his jaw and down to the hollow of his throat. Harry stops every so often, asks Hartley if he’s alright with this, and Hartley bites his lip and nods. He can’t keep a hiss from escaping when Harry touches one of his scars, but he doesn’t pull away, the way he’s always done. ‘It’s fine,’ he says. Harry knows what they are now, where they’re from, the things Hartley had done to deserve them. Hartley remembers each mistake that had led to each punishment, and how Harrison would press his fingers against the healing wounds to see if Hartley would cry out in pain. Now when Harry brushes his fingers over one, Hartley takes his hand and holds it there, forcing himself to meet Harry’s concerned gaze.

The sex is almost an afterthought, languid and achingly tender. They’ve both buried their beating hearts for so long that this is still unfamiliar territory. Hartley digs his fingers into Harry’s back and quiets himself against his shoulder as he climaxes, still conditioned not to make a sound. He feels sweaty and flushed and dirty, but Harry kisses him anyway, and Hartley arcs up to meet him. Whatever happens from this point, he’ll remember Harry as he is now: eyes soft, a curl of hair carelessly falling over his forehead, mouth swollen and red. Hartley reaches up and pulls him into another kiss, tugging at Harry’s bottom lip with his teeth, cupping Harry’s face in his hands. This is what he wants to always recall: the brief freedom he feels when he does it, that juxtaposition of vulnerability and power. He’ll bottle it, tuck it away, and he promises himself that years from now, when he’s alone again, he’ll pull out the memory of that moment where he felt like the sun.

—

Messages from Harry are utilitarian and rare: _I won’t be home_ or _Can you buy toothpaste_ , usually written in caps or with so many dropped vowels that Hartley had, at first, needed Jesse to translate them for him. He reads the message now, over and over, able to understand Harry’s shorthand but still not quite able to process it.

_Pprwrks dn_

It’s the final link they’ve been waiting for. False records flooding the system: a Social Security number and birth certificate, high school transcripts and immunization records, a college diploma from halfway across the world, a chain of past addresses, bank accounts spiraling back through his life, carefully doctored IDs. An entirely new skin to step into. Hartley had asked Harry once, early in the process, how much it had cost, and Harry had waved away the question with an offhand comment that he could afford it, and besides, he’d known Todd for years and he knew he’d be fair. Harry brings home a fat envelope of documents and spills them over the kitchen table. ‘Todd even left your middle names intact,’ he says, holding up Hartley’s birth certificate. ‘You certainly have enough of them.’

‘How gracious of him,’ says Hartley. He flips through a medical record, the original Earth-1 data augmented by notations of childhood exams he’s never heard of but that he supposes have always been par for the course on Earth-2. The immunizations Caitlin had foisted on him before he left have been altered now to reflect a Dr Seberg at an obscure county medical facility. For masochism’s sake, he turns to the dates around the particle accelerator explosion. It’s blank, as he knows it would be. He’d been in pain for weeks before he’d been able to steady his concentration long enough to fashion a crude pair of hearing aids to block out the shrieking. Those early days had been excruciating. He’d clawed his own hands to bloodiness to distract himself; he’d met a boy in an alley to buy pills that only dulled the metallic rattle in his teeth and still left the rest of him a throbbing agony. He’d almost, almost gone to a doctor once, but he couldn’t face the shame of making it onto the casualty list. He would have rather slit his own throat then let Harrison Wells know he’d delivered one final blow.

There are little pieces of his past throughout. Hartley spots a reference to his master’s thesis, stripped of its original school and advisors and re-assigned to a different string of names, and he spots the same names on falsified letters of recommendation. ‘Some are retired, one’s died, and the others redirect to associates of Todd’s if any questions come up,’ Harry says. Hartley marvels at the complexity of the web.

His employment record, Hartley is almost frightened to check, but he does anyway. ‘Evanston Institute for Interdisciplinary Technologies,’ he reads aloud to Harry. Supposedly, he’d spent three years there.

‘Satellite office of S.T.A.R. Labs,’ Harry says. ‘They spoke of you as brilliant, before you quit to move to Central City and pursue other opportunities. It’s enough to get your foot in the door.’

Hartley fiddles with the edge of the page. ‘Did you expect me to work at S.T.A.R. Labs again?’

‘That’s up to you. There are other research facilities — Mercury is smaller and focused mainly on assistive tech, but I’ve known Tina since college and she runs a tight ship. Lakewood Futuristics is trying to make a name for themselves.’

‘There’s a recruiter from Northern Haywood Technologies on campus all the time,’ offers Jesse from somewhere beyond Hartley’s shoulder. ‘He kinda smells like onions, though, so nobody wants to work there.’

‘Don’t oversell it, Jess.’ Harry paperclips a sheaf of papers together.

Jesse shrugs. ’Well, you’re the one that said their CEO is a total jackass.’

In truth, Hartley isn’t even sure if he wants to tread back into the research world. He scans through his master’s thesis — clumsy in a few spots now that the research has advanced, still solid in others — and it’s difficult to summon up the same enthusiasm he’d had back then. He’d always been so renowned for his intellect and it had been the thing that had laid him low in the end. ‘I’ll make a decision soon,’ he says. ‘If that’s alright.’

—

Hartley can’t stop fidgeting in the waiting room. He’s never been to a psychiatrist before, and he’s not entirely comfortable with the idea. He’s arrived too early, read a three-week old issue of _Gab!_ , and resisted, on multiple occasions, to flee the office. He was the one who’d brought the idea up to Harry in the first place, and so now he feels obligated to at least sit through the first appointment. His father’s disparaging commentary about psychiatry still skitters at the edge of his consciousness — _you’re an idiot,_ he can’t keep from telling himself, _an idiot if you think this can help you —_ and he struggles to squelch it.

Jonathan is his father’s age, quiet and pensive. ‘I’d like you to tell me why you called,’ he says.

It’s easier to do it the second time. Hartley’s had time now to sort through the threads of his past and separate them into something manageable. Jonathan listens and nods and scratches notes down, occasionally prodding for clarification. There are omissions and white lies throughout — the accelerator explosion’s been smudged into a vague explanation about a product launch whose lack of safety testing had led to fatalities; for now, he simplifies Harrison into an ill-advised workplace affair that had gone south — but there’s nothing to disguise about the guilt he feels. ‘I came to Central City to start over,’ he says, one of those vague statements that’s true enough, ‘but there are things I can’t shake.’

‘Well, that’s what these sessions are for,’ says Jonathan with the barest hint of a smile. ‘It takes time, of course. Sometimes people think therapy will just bring on that one cathartic fix, but it’s important to remember that this is a road that you have to keep going down. Some days the road is short and flat and some days it’s a walk uphill in a blizzard. Our goal here is to give you the tools to help you handle both types of days.’

Some of the things that Jonathan says, Hartley wants to dismiss as a load of nonsense. He protests at times, at the first session and at many of the ones that follow, but then he begins catching the arguments as they emerge, and he corrects himself, rather than waiting for Jonathan’s inexorably patient reply. He’s too stubborn to admit it, but it’s getting easier.

—

Harry spits out a mouthful of toothpaste. ‘There’s a networking dinner next Thursday at the labs. I thought it would be good for you to finally meet some people.’

‘Should I keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s health?’ says Hartley, to a blank stare. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t have Shaw on this earth.’

Harry helpfully reminds him that he’s an ass. Hartley mock-swoons. ’The Casanova of Central City, master of pillow talk, strikes again. It’s a wonder I’m not in your arms at this very moment.’

‘Or a relief, at least for me,’ Harry says. ‘At any rate, Tina — for whatever reason — is looking forward to meeting you.’

‘Probably as an escape from you.’Hartley kisses him on the cheek and darts out of the bathroom before Harry can get the last word.

He’s nervous, he admits to Jonathan at their next session, and Jonathan hmms and nods in his typical way. ‘Are you worried there will be fallout?’

They’ve discussed his parents, of course. Hartley had had some ugly moments when he’d talked about the night his father had found him with the diplomat’s son, and he’d unraveled completely when he’d talked about the accident — he leaves those details vague, too — that had damaged his hearing. ‘I called him,’ he said to Jonathan. ‘I was alone and frightened and in pain and I thought if he knew I was hurt, he might pick up. I called and I called and every time, they kept saying Mr Rathaway had no son. It was my own fault for asking for help.’

Jonathan had reeled him back in and they’d worked on untying the heavy knots of negativity that had held Hartley in place for so long. The road had been that uphill blizzard they’d mentioned at the first session, and Hartley tries to keep his frustration down that this event — as though he’s never been to some sort of business mixer! — is rustling up the same old anxieties.

He sits on the sofa in Jonathan’s office and shreds a tissue. ‘Yes,’ he admits. He and Harry had talked for a long while over whether they would introduce him as just that Wells family friend, or if Hartley was comfortable with going public as a couple. Hartley had agreed that they could stop hiding — he’s got an identity now, he’s somebody, he can let go of those fears — but now he isn’t so sure.

‘Were you open about your sexuality at your past jobs?’ Jonathan says.

Hartley laughs sardonically. It had been something of an open secret at S.T.A.R. Labs. Ronnie Raymond had once confronted him — ‘Hey, man, are you and Wells…?’ — and Hartley had just given him a shrugging leer and told him to use that brain of his to draw his own conclusions. He’d dropped enough inappropriate comments that if he hadn’t been Harrison’s pet, he would have had an HR file three inches thick. Being open with Harry, though, is a different game, he tells Jonathan. ‘I mean, I was. But there’s sex and…’ he fumbles for the word. ‘Romance. 

Jonathan scratches some notes. ‘Are you worried about the reception from the attendees or from your partner?’ They’ve kept names out of it for now.

‘Both.’

‘Well,’ Jonathan says. He sets down his pen. ‘Let’s start there.’

—

Hartley fusses so long getting ready that Harry drags him out of the bedroom. ‘You’re fine. 

Harry, of course, had been ready in ten minutes, somehow making finger-combed hair and clothes pulled at random from the closet look professional.

‘I want to make a good first impression,’ Hartley protests as Harry tugs him down the hall.

‘Half of the people you’ll meet are morons and most of the other half won’t matter,’ Harry says. ‘I’ll introduce you to the ones who do.’

Hartley worries his lip. ‘I know. It’s just…’ He throws his hands up helplessly. He’d been over this with Jonathan. They’d gotten it to a manageable point. Why is he panicking now?

‘Look.’ Harry takes him by the shoulders. ‘If you don’t want to go public tonight, we don’t have to.’

He could get out of it now. It would be easier and safer. No one would give a second glance to a family friend with the endorsement of Harrison Wells. ‘No,’ he says instead. ‘We’ll do it.’

He stays close to Harry the entire night, and Harry keeps a hand on the small of his back when he detects Hartley’s unease. Hearing Harry refer to him as his partner makes his heart skitter the first time, but the news registers with minimal fuss. Hartley practices his falsified backstory so many times it becomes second nature, glad-hands, nods and laughs politely, and waits for the person to move away before Harry whispers in his ear whether they’re a complete idiot.

‘Oh, there’s Tina. Thank God,’ Harry says, steering Hartley through the crowd.

Hartley had done some reading on Tina and Mercury Labs, thanks to Harry’s offhand comment about her focus on assistive technologies. Mercury had been the brainchild of Tina and her husband, Daniel McGee, a neuroscientist who’d been paralyzed in a plane crash a few years after Mercury’s founding and who’d passed away not long after. He’d spent hours going through Harry’s databases for studies and articles on some of Mercury’s advances and saved copies of some of the research into hearing technologies, but he hasn’t been able to open them yet, for fear of finding out that even on another earth, there’s nothing they can do.

‘Harrison,’ Tina greets him, a smile barely cracking through her brisk British reserve. The pressure of Harry’s hand increases, ever-so-slightly, on Hartley’s back.

‘Just Harry these days,’ he says. ‘I’d like you to meet Hartley, my partner.’

‘The one you mentioned!’ Tina says, extending her hand. Her handshake is firm and confident. ‘Harrison — Harry, excuse me — has told me about some of your work at Evanston.’

‘Oh,’ Hartley croaks. He could kill Harry where they stand. ‘I, um, enjoyed your studies on advances in optical coherence tomography.’ Jesse had actually read over his shoulder and translated vast sections of medical terminology for him, but he leaves that out.

Tina looks impressed. ‘From Barker and Reed? You really should be reading their CT work on sensorineural hearing loss. I prefer not to be immodest, but they’re doing good work.’

Hartley’s stomach drops. ‘I haven’t. But, ah, the…’ He fumbles for one of the more recent articles he’d read, about the long-term considerations for athletic prosthetic replacements, and turns the conversation to it.

‘Men and their machines,’ Tina says, but she seizes on the topic anyway, and Hartley exhales in relief.

‘Well, she didn’t hate you,’ says Harry, when Tina’s pulled away by an investor.

Hartley gulps down the rest of his glass of wine. ‘You really have the art of the compliment mastered.’ Tina seems decent enough, in that intimidatingly brilliant way that Caitlin would have loved, but he feels out of his depth. He’s disappointed, for some reason, and realizes he’d been hoping that Mercury would have felt like a good move.

‘For Tina, not hating you is a compliment. She has standards.’

‘Wonderful. It’s you in a woman’s body.’

Harry sighs. ‘Are you sulking?’

‘All I’m doing is being out of wine. Excuse me.’ Hartley spins on his heel and vanishes into the throng.

Harry is talking to a couple — Hartley eyeballs them, calculates the net worth based on the dress and jewelry alone, and finds it substantial — when he gets back, and he lingers on the fringes for a moment before Harry pulls him back in for an introduction, as warm as ever. He leans into Harry’s hand, hoping this isn’t just for show.

‘Sorry,’ he says, when they’re alone again. ‘It’s been a while since one of these events.’ Osgood had always drilled it into him how important it was for the future face of Rathaway Industries to be seen at events like this, but Hartley had never had his father’s domineering presence (or Harrison’s easy charisma) to make the process any easier.

He feels much lighter when Harry wraps up the night, and they share a long, lingering kiss by Rosie, Harry’s fingers trailing over the knots of tension in Hartley’s shoulders. ‘This isn’t where I belong anymore,’ Hartley says.

Harry opens Rosie’s door. ‘Come on. We’ll talk at home.’

—

Hartley watches the night go by, counting streetlights and taillights on the highway. Harry hasn’t said anything since they started driving. Rosie is so quiet and the roads are so smooth that all Hartley can hear are the sounds of their bodies shifting and that whispering white noise that never turns off.

‘You talked to Tina for all of ten minutes,’ Harry says finally. ‘If that’s what’s bothering you.’

‘It wouldn’t work.’ Hartley picks at a cuticle. ‘I just had a feeling.’

‘It’s not the only research facility in Central City.’

‘I don’t want to be at a research facility,’ Hartley bursts out. ‘People _died_ because of me — ‘

‘It wasn’t your fault — ‘

Hartley waves Harry away. ‘They’re still dead and it was still my project and I don’t get to let go of that, ever. Mercury is doing the kind of work that matters and that helps people. I don’t want to be part of something that goes wrong again and kills someone, or leaves them like me. Like a freak.’

The last words spill out unintentionally and hang in the air.

‘You’re not a freak, Hartley.’

‘I’m a meta,’ Hartley spits. ‘Not even a useful one. I’m a meta whose only power is causing harm to myself and who could have leveled the city because I valued my career over other people’s lives.’ All the work he’s done with Jonathan seems to be unraveling now. All the ugliness is just as raw and as fresh as it’s ever been.

‘Barry would have died _without_ you,’ Harry says. ‘In case you forgot that. Team Flash relied on you plenty.’

Hartley tears at his cuticle again, trying to draw blood. ‘I never belonged on Team Flash, either. They only kept me around because they pitied me.’

‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ barks Harry, sliding Rosie over three lanes of traffic and onto the exit. ‘There were metas we brought down because of you. We used your help to defeat Zoom. Stop rewriting history to make yourself look worse.’

‘I don’t need to rewrite history to do that. It speaks for itself,’ Hartley shoots back.

Harry pulls into a gas station parking lot and turns Rosie off. ‘You know damn well that the accelerator exploded here. Zoom, all of the people he killed, Jesse’s kidnapping, all the metas that went through to the breach to your earth — those were all my fault. Everything you’ve done since I met you was to help clean up problems I caused.’

‘This isn’t about you.’ A bead of blood finally appears, and Hartley squeezes his thumb.

’No, it isn’t,’ says Harry. ‘But I know better than anyone how you feel.’

‘Do you?’ Hartley says. ‘Do you feel his ghost when you’re working? Do you find yourself still writing your notes so that they’d be in the format he liked? Do you see things that reminded you of private jokes you’d had?’

Harry slams his hand down on the steering wheel. ‘Are you going to let him run the rest of your life?’

The blood bead has gotten a thin skin now. Hartley resists the urge to touch it. ‘It’s not something that just goes away.’

‘There’s a difference between living with it and letting it control you.’

‘There’s also a difference between living with someone and trying to control how quickly they deal with problems,’ Hartley says archly.

‘You _aren’t_ dealing with them!’ Harry almost shouts. ‘There’s always some new excuse for you. Until now, I would have said you were happier, but no, we’re back here again. You’re miserable, because you can’t imagine anything else, can you?’

Hartley bites his tongue and watches a uniformed attendant pump gas across the lot. He waits until the man has finished and the driver’s pulled away before he finally looks at Harry. ‘No.’

There’s an almost imperceptible rumble as Harry turns Rosie back on. ‘Then you’re beyond help.’

They don’t speak again on the drive.

—

Hartley stays up late: emails Jonathan, smokes a cigarette, pages through a Soseki Natsume novel in its original Japanese. Harry is in his basement workshop, tinkering, both of them waiting to see who will concede to sleep first.

It’s past midnight when Hartley finally goes down to the basement. Harry doesn’t even look up.

‘You were right,’ Hartley says, knowing Harry won’t react. ‘I never wanted to be happy, because if I was, something would always happen to ruin it.’ He laughs, a little shakily. ‘It turns out that sometimes the only thing that ruins your happiness is yourself.’

—

‘No wonder you moved to Earth-2,’ Jesse groans. ‘This distance thing _sucks_.’

Before the move, Cisco and Hartley — in a rare partnership — had worked diligently to create an inter-dimensional communication system, which had ostensibly been to share theories across the earths but had also been motivated, a little bit, by sentimentality. ‘I mean, we’ll miss you guys,’’ Caitlin had said.

Cisco had rolled his eyes. ‘If you say so.’

Hartley’s checked it periodically, mostly finding a few chatty missives from Caitlin and some Team Flash photos from Barry, but the majority of the communication is a set of encrypted files between Jesse and Wally, hesitantly testing the romantic waters. There’s been no small amount of grumbling from Harry about it — how dare anyone think himself worthy of his beloved daughter — but Jesse has remained undeterred. ‘You’re dating someone from Earth-1, too,’ she counters whenever Harry starts up at the dinner table.

‘What happened to Barry sneaking you to Earth-1 on the weekends for dates?’

‘It’s not really ideal.’ Jesse sandwiches shreds of carrots between cucumber slices and pops them into her mouth. ‘He gets all happy about it and asks how we’re doing and it’s just kinda weird. Hey, do you want a crêpe? I’ve been starving today.’

Hartley shakes his head. ‘Don’t tell me your cheating on me led to a pregnancy.’

‘Gross!’

A beep sounds from somewhere in the restaurant. Hartley freezes. He isn’t exactly sure where it’s coming from, but he knows the sound of the metahuman app. ‘We have to — ‘ he starts, the words cut off as the world blurs by.

‘Get out of there? Yeah, I know.’ Jesse’s flushed and a little out of breath. Hartley stares at her and then around them at the foyer.

‘When?’ is all he can say.

‘I found out last night. I was coming home and some guy almost hit me with his car. The whole world just stopped so I could get out of his way. It was like my whole body was made of lightning. It was pretty cool, honestly.’

Hartley takes a second to process it. ‘Well, I guess you won’t need Barry to run you back to Earth-1 — ow! That hurt.’ He rubs the spot on his arm where Jesse has just landed a punch.

‘I mean, you’re not wrong,’ she says, and there’s a devilish glint in her eye. ‘But, well, there’s Dad.’

She had never actually come home last night, Hartley realizes. ‘You would have set off the alarm.’

‘Not really a conversation I wanted to have with him in the middle of the night.’

Hartley tries to point out that she could have excused it as a programming glitch, and Jesse shakes her head. ‘He’d never fall for that. You know Dad. He’d be combing the house with a gun in each hand. Or probably the whole neighborhood.’

‘I can leave you two alone to talk tonight, if you want,’ Hartley offers. In truth, he’d prefer to leave them alone. He’d stayed awake last night as long as he could, but he’d fallen asleep before Harry had finally come to bed, and Hartley had somehow slept through Harry’s leaving in the morning. He feels a pinprick of anger about the silent treatment. He’d wanted to fix it, but it was clear that was one-sided. The resentment bubbles deep in his stomach.

Jesse makes a face. ‘Ugh. Don’t. You know he’s just going to be all overdramatic about it and I need somebody else to tell him he’s being a big baby.’

Hartley’s attuned to every noise when they hear Harry pull into the driveway: Rosie’s door slamming, Harry’s shoes on the concrete of the garage floor, the fiddling of the always-tetchy door handle, the frantic, insistent beeping of the app.

‘He’s probably having a stroke,’ Jesse says to Hartley. ‘Hi, Dad.’

Harry is hardly paying attention to her, too busy testing settings on his watch and mumbling profanities.

‘Dad.’ Jesse, for the first time, looks nervous. ‘It’s me it’s detecting.’

Harry’s head snaps up. ‘Don’t — ‘ The rest of the sentence withers into silence. Hartley tries to read his expression — shock? horror? disgust? — but he can’t get a handle on it; it’s shifting too fast.

’I’m like Barry,’ Jesse says. ‘Another speedster. It must have happened back on Earth-1 when the accelerator exploded again, but it didn’t manifest until now.’

In the background, the beeping continues. Harry, without looking at it, taps at a series of buttons and the thing goes mercifully quiet. ‘Well,’ he says.

Hartley knows he’ll regret saying it, but he does anyway: ‘Are you going to reprogram it for her, too?’

Jesse gives him a strange look. ‘What do you mean, ‘too’?’

‘Be quiet, Hartley.’ Harry’s voice is low and dangerous, and it thrills Hartley. There’s no disaffected silent treatment now.

‘Must be killing you, huh? You could ignore it when it was just me, but now it’s both of us,’ Hartley says, unable to stop a vicious, vindictive smile. ‘That’s karma, isn’t it? You profited off of getting people to fear and hate the metas and now look at what’s happened to you.’ That argument that’s been simmering, sealed, for so many months, is finally coming to a head.

Harry is nearly trembling with anger now. ’I said be _quiet_.’

‘I’m sorry — I forgot that you hated being reminded of your failures,’ Hartley says.

Jesse grabs him roughly by the back of the shirt, and a split second later she’s slammed him down on an empty train station bench on the outskirts of town. ‘I don’t know what’s going on between you and Dad, but you need to knock it off,’ she snaps. ‘I thought he was going to be the ridiculous one about this.’

She’s gone before Hartley can respond. Hartley imagines the apps of Central City going berserk as a bolt of yellow lightning passes by them, a cacophony of warning klaxons for a nonexistent threat.

—

Tension hangs thick in the Wells home for a few days. Harry hovers disapprovingly around Jesse; Jesse hardly says a word to Hartley other than to call him a selfish jerk; Hartley ducks the both of them.

It’s decided without conference that Hartley will stay behind while Harry and Jesse go back to Earth-1 to discuss Jesse’s new meta status with Team Flash. The space, Harry tells him while shoving clothes into a backpack, is for the best. Hartley, who’s half-expected to be shuttled back to Earth-1 and deposited there for good, doesn’t argue with him.

The goodbyes are perfunctory. Hartley doesn’t even go to the lab to see them through the breach, but stays behind in the house until its stillness threatens to choke him. He’s not sure how he feels about all of this, cycling through vindication and emptiness and sorrow in equal measures and never settling on one emotion for long.

‘I screwed up,’ he says to Jonathan. ‘But so did he.’

Hartley has wrestled with Harry’s anti-meta prejudices since the very beginning. He understands the distrust; Zoom had been no small threat, and even now the reverberations are felt across two worlds. And yet it stings every time he sees the watch or remembers how much pride S.T.A.R. Labs had always taken in the meta-detecting app. For all the affection that passes between them — well, Hartley amends, had before this blowout — there’s always a tiny, nagging reminder in the back of his mind that he’s the thing Harry hates most. It’s the elephant in the room: the knowledge that there are a handful of them (Barry, Cisco, himself) who are the ‘good ones,’ the ones acceptable to socialize with, the ones that don’t need to be identified and shamed and…Hartley doesn’t want to think of what happens to metas on this earth. He doesn’t even like to remember what they’d done with metas on his own.

Jonathan probes, carefully, about their relationship, the thing that makes Hartley more uncomfortable than almost anything else. His father, Harrison, even his status as a meta: those he can discuss, because he’s so used to wielding his pain as both sword and shield, but all these months later, he struggles to say that he loves Harry. He’s never said it aloud, barely allows himself to even think it. He tries, instead, to shift the conversation to his guilt over having hurt Jesse in his haste to accuse Harry, and Jonathan stops him.

‘Before we move on, do you think you have a right to be angry?’ This is a recurring question Jonathan has asked, and that they’ve argued over time and time again.Hartley tries, again, to frame his answer in the context of what had happened with Jesse, but Jonathan shakes his head. ‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes,’ Hartley says finally.

‘Honoring that anger is important,’ Jonathan says. ‘Stifling it is, of course, a defense mechanism that’s served you well for a very long time. It’s been necessary, but it’s sometimes difficult to see where the line can be drawn between using a defense mechanism as protection and as a way to hurt yourself. You’ve taught yourself that expressing your emotions will end badly to the point where you’ll engineer a painful consequence for yourself if you don’t get the desired result in time. In your mind, hurting Jesse was an unintended side effect of your attempts to hurt Harry, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. Instead, you subconsciously tried to hurt her because you knew her pain would hurt you even more.’

Hartley flinches. ‘That’s a lie.’ But it isn’t, and he knows it, and Jonathan knows it, and the weight of it is stifling. He swallows hard and looks out the window for a few minutes. Jonathan waits, patient as ever, and Hartley finally asks him how they fix it.

—

Caitlin sends the message through the dimensions that Harry and Jesse will be staying longer on Earth-1 than anticipated. _We still have the Trajectory suit here and he wants to see if it will fit Jesse,_ she writes. _It took him a while to come around to the idea, but now he’s so proud of her he won’t stop talking about how amazing she is. Typical Harry, right? I’ll try to send him back your way soon. I’m sure you miss him!_

Hartley deletes the message without replying.

He sets a goal for himself to take steps every day to avoid thinking about Harry and Jesse and when they’ll be back. The second-hand bookstore he often frequents has a small sign in the window offering part-time work, and Hartley finagles his way into straightening shelves and unpacking donations. He goes home the first day loaded down with books on the War of the Americas and a cash-in volume on the Zoom menace whose author he recognizes from some of the more insipid articles in _Gab!_ It will, he figures, be good for a laugh if nothing else. To celebrate the first day of honest employment, he visits a cocktail lounge and idly ogles the men who aren’t, in turn, ogling the sequin-clad woman crooning a ballad to the backing of a disinterested orchestra. In the morning, he teaches himself to make a clumsy set of pancakes, more oblong than round, and winces when he bites into a baking soda bubble.

But he still misses them, the guilt knocking around inside, the frustration and anger he hasn’t been able to quite silence still flaring from time to time. He could deal with it, Hartley knows, if they could just _talk_.

He isn’t even home when they get back; he’s cross-legged on the floor of the children’s section, rearranging a collection of hardbacks decorated with apple-cheeked children hiking or feeding chickens or skiing. Most of his time over the past few weeks has been spent here, scooping scattered books back up and rehoming them after a toddler has roared through. Hartley’s started recommending titles here and there, and he gets a warm glow in the pit of his stomach when he sees someone buy one of his picks.

His phone stays in the back office with his wallet and keys and a neatly folded-over brown bag of lunch, so Hartley doesn’t even check it until he leaves for the afternoon.

_We’re back, but you’re not??_ reads a message from Jesse. There’s one missed call from Harry.

‘I was at work,’ Hartley says by way of explanation when Harry picks up.

‘Work?’

‘I got a job while you were gone.’

Harry sounds annoyed. ‘That’s usually what work means. Where?’

’Nightingale Books.’ Hartley suddenly feels ashamed of himself for working in a place as paltry as a bookstore when he could have been at Mercury. He sucks in air past his teeth and quiets the thought as best he can.

‘Didn’t know Nightingale was hiring physicists.’

Hartley sighs and leans against a wall. He’s clenching the phone so tightly he’s sure his knuckles have gone white. ‘Are we still fighting, then?’

‘I don’t know, Rathaway. Are we?’ Harry only calls him ‘Rathaway’ when he’s annoyed or when he’s trying to bait Hartley. Hartley wills himself to steadiness.

‘No.’ He’ll give Harry nothing to work with, nothing to twist.

A bitter laugh from the other end of the line. ‘That’s a change.’

Hartley pushes open the door of the train station and skitters down the stairs two at a time. All the emotions of the last few weeks are rising to a fever pitch, each of them clamoring for release. ‘Can’t I just have missed you? Because I did.’ The train is due any minute, so he knows he needs to talk fast. ‘I was angry, and I said things in anger. But I…I love you, and it hurt that you were gone for so long. Anything could have happened while you were there, and maybe I wouldn’t have ever seen you again.’ Saying it out loud makes him sick with nervousness. He’d only said _I love you_ to one other person in his life, in a moment of hazy weakness, and Harrison had smiled at him in a sweet, sad way and pushed deeper inside him, hard enough to hurt. He can’t see Harry’s reaction now, which almost frightens him. He lies, hurriedly, that the train’s pulled in, and hangs up the phone before he has to hear a reply.

—

The walk from the station to the house has the portent of a doomed man’s walk to the guillotine. Hartley drags his feet and lights a cigarette to give him an excuse for dawdling. He’s smoked more in these last weeks than he has at any time since his firing from S.T.A.R. Labs. Now that Harry is back, he’ll have to cut down again, or maybe things will go down in flames so badly that he should stop at the store again and buy himself another few packs. Hartley stops and takes a drag deep enough to make him light-headed. He can see the house from where he stands, and he doesn’t want to take another step towards it.

After the explosion, once Hartley had gotten the pain under control, every movement had taken on an uncontrollable, unbearable significance. Every gesture had had untold layers of meaning. He’d been hyper-aware of everything in his body, all of its minuscule shifts and whispers magnified tenfold. He had been so used to the pain that he rushed to fill the absence of it. Had he always had such a horrible habit of clicking his teeth together? He forced himself to stop curling and uncurling his toes in their socks, suddenly irritated with a movement he’d always found comforting. Even his own breathing seemed too loud. He’d had to relearn how to exist in his own body without constantly taking stock of it and finding it wanting. Now he’s so terribly, terribly aware of it all over again.

His hands shake a little when he finally unlocks the front door. He doesn’t announce his arrival, only shuts the door as quietly as possible and curls his hand around the keys so they don’t rattle when he puts them in the bowl. The house smells like percolating coffee, which makes Hartley smile despite himself. Harry had always griped that Earth-1’s coffee just could never compare. Hartley had stuck with the tea collection — most of which, Jesse had told him, Beth would gift with a plate of cookies — because he never had been able to to master Harry’s rocket-ship-esque coffeemaker. He still gives it a daily baleful look when he’s in the kitchen, knowing that only the coffeemaker’s lack of sentience prevents it from returning his antagonism.

Harry is on the living room sofa, flipping through the book on Zoom Hartley had bought. ‘Trash,’ he says, without looking up.

‘I didn’t buy it for its literary value.’

‘Good, because there isn’t any.’ Harry tosses the book down.

Hartley braces himself against the back of an armchair. ‘If you want to fight with me, then just start a fight.’ God, but he’s an idiot. Why did he tell Harry he loves him? Stupid, stupid, so stupid. Jonathan had been wrong. He doesn’t need to engineer a painful ending; one’s always waiting for him regardless of what he does.

‘So you got a job,’ Harry says instead. Hartley slams his fist down on the chair. He doesn’t swear often — at least not in English; he’d always been taught that profanity was a refuge of the small-minded — but he does now, fed up with Harry’s baiting and circling.

‘Yes, Harry, I got a fucking job. And it has nothing to do with this conversation.’ He’s stiff and tired and sore and he doesn’t know what Harry’s endgame here is. He just wants to get whatever this is over with.

‘Which conversation?’ Harry says. ‘The one about the book or the one where you said you loved me?’

Hartley wants to storm out of the room now. ‘If you wanted to talk about that, you could have just brought it up in the first place.’

‘Did _you_ want to talk about it?’ Harry’s voice has lost its sharp edge. ‘You hung up before you’d even finished speaking.’

Hartley sits on the edge of the armchair, lightly, body still tense, ready to run. ‘I didn’t mean to say it,’ he says, weaving his fingers together. ‘It just happened. I don’t know what to say about it now. All I know is that I don’t want to fight, but it feels like you do. I’m tired of it. Can’t we stop? Can’t we just be happy? Why did I move here if we’re just going to fight and shout at each other all the time?’

He’s curling into himself, a habit he’d picked up long ago and never quite abandoned. Shoulders shrinking, hands balling, head tucked in low and close to his chest. _I want to love you,_ he can’t bring himself to say, but he knows it now and he lets himself _think_ it. He’s spent so many years hiding himself away for his parents’ sake, so many years holding himself above the people around him, so many months now holding Harry’s at arm’s length when the emotions become too raw and terrifying. He can’t do it anymore, doesn’t have the energy any longer. He’s tried and failed, over and over, to get to the point of sustaining his own openness. He’s let Harry in, but he won’t let him stay for fear of what he’ll find.

‘Being back on Earth-1 was strange,’ Harry says, a hint of bemusement in his voice. ‘I thought I would get space, but it turns out you were there the whole time.’ He tells Hartley about the weeks he’d been gone: his fears about Jesse — ‘And I was wrong. I’m sorry for everything, and if you want to shout at me, you've got every right to,’ he admits, holding up his bare wrist — and how well she’d done against a meta attack there; about how that West kid maybe isn’t that bad after all; how Caitlin had asked about Hartley because his messages had become so infrequent. The beds, he says, were no more comfortable than last time, and Hartley can’t hold back a smile at the memory of the handful of times they’d snuck off to disused rooms for sloppy blowjobs and the occasional fuck, up until Harry had sworn off the mattresses for wreaking havoc on his back.

They had stayed after hours and eaten Big Belly Burger, the three of them, the night they had decided that Hartley would move to Earth-2. Those had been the days of a warier Jesse, thrilled to be returning home but unsure of how to feel about this interloper who’d be tagging along. Harry had been happier then, squeezing Hartley’s hand and giving him one of those rare smiles. Hartley had been terrified and overjoyed in equal measure.

Hartley feels Harry’s fingers travel through his hair and down the line of his neck. He’s missed this, and involuntarily, he straightens, looking up at Harry, seeking reassurance and guidance. He’s a little less afraid, at long last, of the love he sees in Harry’s eyes.

—

The metahuman awareness app is faded out without much fanfare. Harry authorizes a press release saying only that support for the app will be ending within the month. The _Planeteer_ , of course, sneers that it’s another failed S.T.A.R. Labs project, but what _can_ be expected of a quack like Harrison Wells? They post equally dismissive articles about this new speedster in town, hypothesizing that she’s plotting against the citizens of Central City up until the day Jesse pulls the editor-in-chief from the wreckage of his mangled car.

‘I thought about not doing it, but Dad would have gotten lonely if he didn’t have new articles from his nemesis every day,’ she says over a veritable mountain of scrambled eggs.

Harry gives her a look. Jesse is unrepentantly beatific about it.

‘Come on,’ objects Hartley. ‘We could put together something almost as good as the Planeteer just between us.’ He gestures a dramatic headline: ‘Known fraudster Harrison Wells soon to be implicated in massive organ harvesting ring.’

Jesse scoffs around a mouthful of eggs. ‘Boring. They’ve run that a bunch of times.’

‘And not a single organ to show for it,’ says Harry, scattering cinnamon and toast crumbs over the _Central City Chronicle_ and leaving it there. ‘Disappointing.’

Harry, of course, clips every positive piece of press about Jesse from the paper and saves it. Whenever they’re out and overhear someone commenting on that new speedster, Harry flashes Hartley a beaming smile. A woman in the grocery store, gossiping with her friend, says, ‘What does she go by — is it the Quickness? Something like that,’ and Hartley has to drag Harry into the bread section to avoid having him loudly correct her.

‘Simpletons,’ Harry hisses under his breath. Hartley pries the multigrain out of his hands before Harry squashes it and tries to gently reform it back into something resembling a healthy loaf before giving up and adding it to the cart.

When he isn’t at Nightingale, he’s at the labs, more than a little overwhelmed by the gulf between what he remembers of the Earth-1 lab and this stately monument of progress. ‘It must be nice being back in a place where people actually like you,’ he says to Harry after the third lab assistant waves hello. ‘I imagine it’s a rare feeling.’

‘You’re all heart.’ Harry slings an arm over his shoulder.

They commandeer one of the secured workrooms, Harry fiddling with modifications to Jesse’s suit and Hartley writing tracking overlay and biosensitivity monitoring programs. The technology here is so far ahead of anything he’s ever dreamed of on Earth-1 that he finds himself having to rewrite his code to take better advantage of its portability and flexibility.

Harry suggests, only once, that Hartley’s talent would be an enormous asset to S.T.A.R. Labs, and Hartley shuts him down immediately. ‘I’m doing this because I want to,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to feel like it’s an obligation.’

He likes his work at Nightingale, as simple as it is. There are a few regular customers he sees: Lily, who stops in every other Wednesday and religiously buys three romance novels; Matthias, a pudgy three-year-old who clings to Hartley’s leg while studying the picture books with startling intensity; Jiao, who dresses to the nines and has an insatiable appetite for history books. Hartley is surprised with himself for how much he enjoys their company and how easily the conversation comes to him. It’s satisfying in a different way than his lab work, feeding a part of him that he hadn’t realized was starving in the first place.

—

Harry grouses endlessly about Wally’s presence on Earth-2. He may _tolerate_ the West kid, he says, but that doesn’t make him good enough for Jesse. ‘Four angels could descend from the heavens and present the perfect specimen of humanity and you still wouldn’t think he’s good enough,’ Hartley says. He’s dragged Harry out of the house to a robotics exhibit at the science museum to avoid ruining Jesse’s evening with yet another ‘Open doors _only_ in this house!’ shout 

‘They’re probably up to something awful,’ complains Harry, staring dolefully at a cross-section of a deep-sea diving robot as though it’s entirely responsible for the situation. Hartley, who had passed Wally condoms before he’d left the house, feigns intense interest in the advancements in withstanding sea pressure. The majority of the night has been spent trying to keep Harry’s focus (the history of robotics: boring; robots in film: childish; an interactive exhibit about using robot arms to handle dangerous tasks that require human distance: scowls and eye-rolls).

Hartley gives up the robotic arm controls. The egg it had been holding drops from its careful grip and rolls into a pile of straw near the exhibit corner, much to his irritation. ‘Yes, Harry, they’re probably having sex. And life will go on.’

Harry sputters. Hartley ignores him and goes back to trying to get the robot arm latched back onto the egg. He’ll be damned if he’ll lose to a glorified claw machine. He sees Harry’s hand going for the controls and neatly steps on Harry’s toe, to no avail. The egg slides out of his grasp and rolls away again. ’Wally loves her. He worships her. And she’s happy, which should make _you_ happy if you have any sense. She’s old enough to know her own mind, Harry.’

‘She’s my daughter — ‘ Harry makes another play for the controls, just as Hartley watches the egg slither — how can an egg even do that, he wonders, but slither it does — out of his reach.

‘People are staring,’ he reminds Harry.

‘They’re probably staring at your inability to master basic robotics,’ Harry retorts. ‘Give me that. You’re useless.’

Hartley steps aside and waves grandly at the controls. ‘Be my guest.’ He’s realized, over time, that love sometimes means sacrificing your pride on the altar of someone else’s ego so he’ll stop pitching fits over his daughter’s romantic life.

‘You haven’t fooled me for a minute,’ Harry says, adding a few choice profanities when the arm clinches on nothing but air. ‘This conversation isn’t even close to — damn it — over — _damn_ it.’

‘I thought you were the expert and I was useless.’ Hartley leans against the exhibit railing and gives Harry a crooked smile.

‘They always gimp these things — ‘ Harry clamps his mouth shut when a particularly colorful invective half-slips out.

Hartley tuts. ‘Temper, temper.’ He loves Harry so terribly, terribly much, even in moments like this, when he’s all pettiness and spite, or perhaps _because_ of his pettiness and spitefulness. The realization threatens to bowl him over sometimes with its intensity. How did he end up here, on an unfamiliar earth, fighting a robotic arm, defending the romantic proclivities of post-adolescents, filled nearly to bursting with the amount of love he has for this maddening, inconsistent, overprotective,brilliant, surly curmudgeon?

Harry throws his hands up in disgust. ‘If this is what they’re using for these tasks, I can’t imagine they get anything done.’

‘The savior of Central City, laid low by a traveling exhibit.’ Hartley buffs his nails on his sweater. ‘Come on, there’s a display about robot uses in surgery. Let me play tourist. We never had anything like that back home.’

‘We’re going home,’ Harry says.

‘We are _not_ going home. We’re staying out and letting Jesse live her life.’ There’s a laugh of delight behind them, and Hartley turns to see a boy of maybe ten scoop the egg up and place it gently in its nest.

‘Don’t you start,’ Harry warns before Hartley can even open his mouth. His expression has gone past murderous and is firmly into vile territory.

Hartley smiles serenely at him and glides over to the surgical display. ‘ _Accipere quam facere praestat injuriam_ ,’ he tosses over his shoulder. It is better to suffer an injustice than to do an injustice.

‘Still obnoxious, Rathaway.’ Harry follows him, with no small amount of glowering, to the next exhibit.

‘Still right, Wells.’ Hartley dares to intertwine his fingers with Harry’s. ‘Let’s enjoy the rest of the night.’

—

There are fewer lunch dates now, between school and friends and Wally and work and Jesse’s need to dash off at a moment’s notice to stop a mugger in his tracks, but Hartley and Jesse still try to make time for each other when they can. ‘Tradition, or something,’ Jesse calls it. In the winter, they go to Nikita’s and split blintzes and vareniki, Hartley eschewing gloves on the way home and warming his hands around almost-too-hot containers of pelmeni soup. Jesse, too impatient to keep pace with him, zips through the streets and meets him every few blocks. ‘Hurry up,’ she tells him, balanced on the balls of her feet, hands on hips.

‘It’s icy,’ says Hartley. ‘I don’t want to spill the soup.’

‘I could just take you home,’ Jesse points out, but Hartley always turns down the offer; it leaves his head spinning and an ugly roaring in his ears that takes hours to fully quiet.

It makes him happy to see how much she loves being a speedster. There’s a flush in her cheeks and a constant smile on her face. ‘It’s such an incredible feeling,’ she says to him. ‘I used to kind of feel like — way back when you first moved here — I didn’t have any control over anything anymore and there wasn’t anything I could do to change it, but now I can. It makes me feel like I got my life back.’

She has a whole team now, composed of some of S.T.A.R. Labs’ brightest women. Harry had been loath to step aside at first, so used to being an invaluable Team Flash resource, but Jesse had stood firm, reminding him that he had the rest of the lab to run free in. ‘I’ve got this, Dad,’ she promises. ‘I can take care of myself.’ Harry still hovers on the fringes, ready to rush in at a moment’s notice, but he’s learning how not to push his limits. The best thing he can do, Jesse tells him, is believe in his own parenting and believe that she can stand on her own two feet.

—

‘There are some new changes at work I’d like to discuss with you,’ Harry says one night, interrupting Harley’s concentration mid-sentence. He jams a bookmark into his book, trying to switch his thought process back from Spanish. He hopes whatever Harry has to say is worth it.

Harry rifles through a pile of folders on the coffee table. ‘The board has been having conversations about extending the charitable arm of the Labs into something more formal.’

‘Which means what to me?’

‘It means — here it is.’ Harry slides a sheaf of paperwork over. ‘It’s early days, but they’d like to establish a foundation focusing on helping children in Central City succeed.’

Hartley flips through the sheets, pausing on a set of scrawled possibilities for mission statements. _To empower all children, regardless of circumstance, to achieve their fullest potential_ , reads one. Another one, marked with a question mark, says, _To erase the barriers to success by providing learning, community, and assistance to future generations._ Further down, a page comments on ensuring that the needs of the whole child are met: economically, socially, intellectually, emotionally.

‘And…?’ he says, letting the word linger. He’s had some small experience with sitting in on audit committee meetings for Rathaway Industries’ scholarship foundation (which Hartley had always thought was a joke, since the amounts it handed out were so individually insubstantial they hardly made a tuition dent), but it’s never been his focus. Besides, he enjoys making Harry squirm.

‘They’re looking for advisory board members,’ Harry says. ‘I thought you would be a good fit.’

Hartley feels almost a little insulted despite himself. ‘Why?’

‘Because I know you, and I know deep down, you want to help people.’

There’s a part of Hartley that still hurts and is bitter and vengeful that no one was ever around to help him when he was young— no teachers or friends or family had ever bothered to reach out — and he almost wants to shove the paperwork away and tell Harry that Central City’s children aren’t his problem, that he had to make his own way, but he doesn’t. His heart hurts at the thought of someone having cared enough to have been there for him. He studies the paper, at something of a loss for words.

‘There’s only been one real meeting,’ says Harry. ‘What you’ve got there is the entirety of the work that’s been done. Nothing’s set in stone yet. It’s all still taking form.’

‘A lot of notes for one meeting,’ Hartley says, not looking up from the paperwork. A good deal of it’s handwritten, Harry’s hasty scribbling near-illegible as always.

Harry gives him a half-smile. ‘I was thorough for your sake.’

‘Did you think I’d say yes?’

‘I was hoping you would.’ Harry never gets that earnest tone with anyone other than Jesse and Hartley.

Hartley keeps reading the notes, pausing every so often to decipher Harry’s chicken scratch and shorthand. There are, he has to admit, a few seeds of good ideas sprinkled throughout, and he gets up to find a pen and pad of paper to add his own thoughts. ‘Inclusivity,’ he says, half to Harry, half to himself. ‘Languages. If you’re going to offer after-school programs, why not incorporate those?’

‘So you can have another generation annoying each other in Latin?’ says Harry.

‘Not just that. Things like sign language.’ Hartley jots it down. After the explosion, he’d worried, for not an insignificant amount of time, that the pain would eventually completely destroy his hearing, and he’d tried to teach himself lip reading and a few words in sign language. He’d given up, in too much agony to be able to focus, but he’s never forgotten the terror and uncertainty and isolation he’d felt at not knowing if one of his main ways of communicating with the world would be permanently altered. He’s gotten so used to his hearing aids that they hardly feel like anything, and the white noise in his ears is simply second nature now, but it’s been an ugly road to get there. He looks up at Harry. ‘It shouldn’t just be about success. It should be about making them feel like people.’

Harry has that proud smile, that _I-knew-I-was-right-to-believe-in-you_ smile, and Hartley laughs in resignation. ‘Fine. When’s your damned board meeting?’

—

Hartley had worked like this at the labs on Earth-1, not going home until three and four in the morning (and sometimes not going home at all, pausing only to catch an hour or two of sleep on a cot before gulping down the strongest coffee he could brew and going back to work). After his shifts at Nightingale end, he sequesters himself in Harry’s office while Harry works in the basement; Jesse leaves them notes that she’s going out with Veronica and Wally and knows that no matter how late she comes home, they’ll both still be hunched over their projects and won’t even notice her sneaking in. Hartley arrives early at every board meeting, listening attentively and taking meticulous notes. Harry attends, but hangs back, letting Hartley do the talking for both of them. When the meetings end, he touches Hartley on the arm and slips out of the room, a silent gesture to say _I’ll be in my office and I know you’ll be talking to the accountants for at least another hour_.

At the dinner table, Hartley props up books on nonprofit planning and reads until Harry takes them away. ‘You can spare half an hour,’ he says. Hartley sulks and snatches them back as soon as he’s put his plate in the dishwasher. He folds up on the sofa afterwards and reads until his back goes stiff and his eyes go bleary, and then presses a knuckle to the base of his spine to wake up and begins the process again. He goes through every book he can find at the library — on nonprofits, fiscal management, fundraising, early childhood development — and orders copies to highlight and dog-ear. Harry sometimes gives up the ghost first and tries to coax him to bed, but Hartley waves him away, saying he’s got one more chapter, and then he’ll be upstairs. In the morning, he wakes up on the sofa, joints aching, the book sprawled on the floor next to him and the chapter unfinished.

‘I tried to wake you up, but you were a snoring rock,’ Harry informs him. ‘Couldn’t be moved.’

‘I don’t snore.’ Hartley stumbles upstairs to hurl himself under a scalding shower. Harry has already left for work by the time Hartley gets dressed. He leaves only a note on the kitchen table: _Yes, you do_. Hartley thinks about crumpling it up and instead uses it to mark his place in a book about adolescent psychology.

He gets so involved at some of the board meetings that Harry finally resorts to lightly tapping his chair with one foot to signal him to stop talking and let someone get a word in edgewise. ‘I wasn’t _done_ ,’ he complains on the ride home.

‘The website designers are paid to know more than you. You read one book on it.’

‘I read four!’

‘Hartley.’ Harry is politely, firmly, only a little exasperatedly parental about it.

The house is empty when they get home; Jesse’s taken Wally to a marathon of the _Terminator_ franchise, which, he’d been baffled to learn, is a series of jaunty buddy cop movies on this earth. ’T-1000 can’t kill anything,’ she’d told him. ‘He can hardly even handle a gun.’ Wally had been appalled.

Hartley takes the opportunity to promptly get into bed and crack open a book on tax law. Harry situates himself around him and begins highlighting a scientific journal, knocking Hartley in the head several times with his elbow while he works.

‘I know that’s on purpose.’ Hartley shuffles lower in the bed. Harry responds with another elbow to the skull.

‘It used to be that when I worked this much, it was a problem,’ Harry responds.

‘I’m at a very important section,’ complains Hartley. ‘The rules are all different on this earth and I have a lot to learn. Ouch! Stop doing that! You’re going to give me a goose egg.’

‘Good.’

Hartley slams the book shut. ‘A normal person would just _ask_ for sex rather than trying to give their partner a concussion, you know.’

‘Give that thick skull of yours a bit more credit,’ says Harry, but he’s already got his pants halfway off.

—

The appointments with Jonathan are a little less frequent now. ‘I think we’ve gotten to that point,’ Jonathan says. ‘You’ve been doing much better.’

The praise makes Hartley glow a little. Still, he says, he wants to keep coming; he’s long since learned not to let his ego get the best of him. They spend their sessions focusing on his new work with the foundation. ‘I’m still wrestling with resentment,’ he admits. ‘I’m better with controlling me, but it’s still there.’

‘Anger is a very human emotion, and it’s not always a bad one,’ says Jonathan. ‘Anger, jealousy, resentment — we like to think of those as bad things we need to reject in order to be good people, but that’s not the case. Remember, the anger, like many things in your life, exists because you needed it to, and even now you need it. The fact that you’re angry about the way you were treated means that you know your childhood self didn’t deserve it. It may not feel like it to you, but that anger is a form of compassion and forgiveness for yourself. It doesn’t have to be erased for you to move past it. You just need to reshape it, and it sounds to me like you’re already doing that with the foundation. You know the things that hurt you most and the things you wish your past self could have avoided most, and you’re doing your best to create an environment where someone else can avoid that going forward. Don’t forget that it’s okay to grieve, Hartley. You’ve suffered and lost more than a lot of people ever will. It’s okay to let that grieving process continue.’ 

Hartley sighs. ‘I know. I just need to hear it a lot.’

—

There are, in between the meetings and Harry’s endless attempts to pry research tomes out of Hartley’s hands, simple pleasures. Hartley rests his head on Harry’s shoulder while they brush their teeth in the mornings; Jiao, rustling in to Nightingale in her best fascinator and a vivid red dress, gushes happily to Hartley about her new fiancee while he’s ringing up her book on the rise of Earth-2’s industrial age. Jesse sets up a line of three stools in the basement workshop so that she and Wally and Hartley can have affable competitions to correct Harry’s calculations and duck the erasers Harry lobs at him. (It’s been decided, Jesse whispers to Hartley one night after Wally has to go back to Earth-1, that when they’ve both finished their educations, Wally will move to Earth-2 full-time. ‘I mean, no offense,’ she adds, ‘but your Earth kind of sucks in comparison.’) Harry begrudgingly allows Hartley to drag him to classical music performances and modern art museums, and Hartley can’t hide his smile when Harry’s approached as ‘Are you _the_ Harrison Wells? Can I have your autograph?’ by a few awed fans.

‘Are you _the_ Harrison Wells who kicked me at least fourteen times in bed last night?’ he says in Harry’s ear as they take their seats. ‘Please, sir, will you sign my bruise?’

‘For someone who was in so much pain, you seemed energetic enough this morning.’

Hartley shuts up. 

Earth-1 has faded into little more than a distant memory. He keeps up his stream of contact with Team Flash — Caitlin writes that Cisco laughed ‘for at least ten minutes’ when he’d found out that Hartley was working on a charitable initiative — but there’s no painful twinge of nostalgia there or any greater pull to visit again. He’s made his life and found his rhythms here. He wishes, still, that he could go back in time and tell his childhood self that there would be an end to it. _Osgood is wrong,_ he wishes he could say. _You’ll be loved. You’ll be valued. You’ll be somebody._

—

He’s so nervous the day of the foundation announcement that he refuses to eat until Harry slams a granola bar into his hand. ‘If you throw up at your first press conference, the _Planeteer_ will remind you of it when you’re seventy,’ he says. ‘Now shut up and eat.’

Hartley has been in front of crowds plenty of times. His father had been prone to rambling speeches during which he was expected to stand perfectly still; Harrison had been casual, fluid grace, weaving the room into the conversation before he’d stepped aside to let Hartley or Caitlin or Ronnie do the technical lifting of a product launch. He’s familiar, too, with Harry’s wise-cracking confidence at his own press conferences, and he hopes that some of that will pass to him today when he stands up to speak.

Harry, of course, needs no notes to speak and has hardly rehearsed his words. He strolls around the podium, gesturing expansively and buttering the group into a few chuckles. Hartley’s stomach churns. Harry is so good at this; he’ll be a hard act to follow.

‘We’ve assembled an incredible advisory board,’ Harry says. ‘The amount of work they’ve been putting into this foundation has been nothing short of astounding. But they should speak for themselves. I’ve asked one of our board members, Hartley Rathaway, to say a few words to you today about why we’ve established the foundation.’ He steps back and motions Hartley up to the mic. There’s a smattering of polite applause. Hartley’s palms are damp.

His voice comes out a little weak at first, but it’s during the disposable bits — ‘It’s an honor to speak with you today’ and a ‘Thank you for coming’ — before Hartley looks out into the audience and sees Wally and Jesse, arms linked, both grinning to beat the band, and he finds a new steadiness.

‘There’s a quote from Virgil,’ he begins again. ‘ _Forsan miseros meliora sequentur._ Translated, it means ‘Who knows? Better times may come to those in pain.’ While we live in an extraordinary city here, full of advancements and progress, we cannot lose sight of the fact that we are not perfect. There are still those among us, our youngest and most vulnerable, who are struggling and suffering. Our goal here today is to help put an end to that. At the S.T.A.R. Labs Foundation for Children, we want to be the light in the darkness for those who are searching. We want to help lift the voices of the voiceless and bring power to the powerless. We want to create a sense of community and belonging for every child who’s ever felt lost or alone. We believe that all children deserve the right to be part of the shining future of Central City and beyond, regardless of who they are. This may seem lofty, but we believe that there is nothing more important than ensuring that the generations following us are able to carry on our proudest traditions and elevate us higher. For all of the wonderful things our brightest minds and most open hearts have been able to accomplish, we must know that our work is not yet complete, and will not be until all of our citizenry has equal opportunity for success and happiness. Each of us in Central City is a unique, incredible human being with our own strengths to offer others, and every one of us deserves a world where we’ve embraced and encouraged that idea. I thank all of the voices who’ve joined us in support already, and I welcome all of you to support our crucial work. Thank you.’

He pauses for a brief moment, wondering if the photographers can detect his heart threatening to leap out of his chest, before he introduces Natalia, the programming director, up to speak about some of the foundation’s initiatives, and departs the podium to his own set of applause. Harry squeezes his shoulder as they blend back into the crowd. He doesn’t say anything, but his smile is enough.

It’s all a whirlwind: speakers and photographers and handshakes and a blur of congratulating faces. The papers have pictures in the morning — Natalia’s presentation and Harry’s opening remarks and the entire foundation staff clustered for one giddy group shot — and the _Chronicle_ even has a small photo of Hartley speaking with a line from his speech as a pull quote. Jesse dashes out to the newsstand for extra copies; Wally sums up the entire experience with a ‘Congrats, that’s really cool, dude.’ Hartley tells him it’s the nicest thing anyone’s said about the entire event.

 Harry pulls him into a one-armed embrace, too busy scrambling the eggs with the other hand to fully devote his attentions. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ he says. ‘You were perfect up there.’ Hartley leans against him, slinging one arm around Harry’s waist, knowing best now how their bodies fit together.

‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘But I’m getting there.’


End file.
